Disclaimer: We run a Heldesk software, Busibud.com which maps out a company's customer support process and helps them outsource only the mapped out part. The helpdesk software is free to use.

I've been helping companies setup their customer support processes for some time now. Initially, founders/core team members must do customer support on their own. This should happen till your team has some visibility of the process (what kind of questions you get and how to reply to them).

------- What are the ways to handle customer support?

You can do it synchronously (chat or phone call) or asynchronously (email). Usually, async customer support requires lesser money/time because things can be structured. But, before you have some visibility of the process and are still finding p/m fit, I would suggest you talk to people.

------ Outsource vs do it yourself?

Before you know your process, do it yourself. No one can decide how things can be answered. Once the process has been mapped out, a lot of the startups I know of ask every team member to pitch in for customer support. This may lead to better quality but leads to huge costs as well. I've seen salesmen spending 1-2 hours everyday on customer support answering what they call "dumb questions". You can outsource it as well, which comes with problems of its own. For starters, it will be very hard to find an outsourcing partner who will be ready to deal with extremely small volumes.

Even if you do manage to outsource, your process will now be managed by someone else. Ad-Hoc changes become difficult to communicate and the people giving out support for you will also be giving out support for other companies....hence leading to quality issues. Unfortunately, most outsourcing companies still rely primarily on training to ensure quality. They don't use the technology they should be using. Thus, quality will depend on the infrastructure of the outsourcing partner (training managers, quality managers, etc).

Once you reach a decent size, hiring people and creating your own customer support team is an option but is usually more expensive (HR/payroll/training/infrastructure). But, it also leads to better quality. Do remember that customer support teams have a huge turnover rate...people keep going and coming in. Thus, training and quality monitoring costs can be huge!!

------ What is the average time to resolve queries?

I've seen a first response time of 5 minutes and also first response times of a few days. Don't know what the average is but depends on a lot of factors. The one doing it in 5 minutes usually has happier customers.

------ How much budget do you allocate for CS?

This is a tricky question. Even huge companies have a problem with this. The amount of budget to be allocated would depend on a lot of factors. What I would suggest is that your get started with a particular level of resolution time (which would determine your budget) and then try to optimize it using a series of A/B tests with retention/return being the metric being monitored (the metric too can depend on a lot of factors). Once you use these metrics, you would have a better idea of how much budget you should allocate. I might be wrong, but Busibud.com is perhaps the only customer support tool that I know of that lets you A/B test customer support strategies.