3 ms·

My team received similar support recently. Want to know why their support sucks? Everyone in the company is on rotating support desk duty. I'm not kidding.

by gspleen 11y ago

My team received similar support recently. Want to know why their support sucks? Everyone in the company is on rotating support desk duty. I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey. Once I read into that a bit more their support delays, lost emails, and shoddy advice all made a lot more sense.

michaelschade 11y ago
Hey, sorry you had a bad experience. We have a dedicated support team that helps with the majority of questions. Like you say, folks from throughout the company do answer support questions directly too sometimes. The most common case for this is engineers that help out with products they just launched. They have the best answers and can make changes to the product directly in response to feedback; we've found the support quality there is really good. I'd like to learn more about where we fell short in your case. Could you forward any of the emails to me at michael@stripe.com? And if you have any other thoughts—about this or Stripe as a whole—I'd love to hear them as well!
- gspleen 11y ago
  We were informed that it was common and no trouble for you to accept a dataset and handle the import into your system. Upon pulling that dataset and waiting on several multi-day delays we were told that, oh, you don't do that in our case and that most clients just did it themselves over an API. Which we then did internally as a last minute item on a very tight, very big deadline. Just the sort of thing that's fun to do with client credit card data. Past that I'm not interested in giving out any more info about my company. EDIT: Wow. Sure am glad that I bothered to type up an honest answer.
jcrites 11y ago
> I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey. This is a good idea and I'd recommend it. Perhaps not as a mandatory forced rotation, but as something that everyone on a team is encouraged to contribute to. Understanding the customer experience, and their problems and day-to-day frustration, are extremely valuable for informing product development and business priorities generally. That said, if software engineers are doing it and it's not their primary job function, then I'd suggest that only where there's no SLA. Full time support is probably necessary for things that have an SLA (probably only an unpaid forums / IRC type of thing). Meeting a fast SLA while giving high quality responses is difficult, especially under high growth, and requires the attention of dedicated people who can be measured on it. But yes I've found involvement in the day to day customer experience to be beneficial and enlightening even for roles that don't directly interact with customers routinely. It helps you understand your customers. The best team will be one where everyone has a connection to and understands the customers, their problems, how the business helps them, and where it can improve.

by gspleen 11y ago

michaelschade 11y ago

Hey, sorry you had a bad experience. We have a dedicated support team that helps with the majority of questions. Like you say, folks from throughout the company do answer support questions directly too sometimes. The most common case for this is engineers that help out with products they just launched. They have the best answers and can make changes to the product directly in response to feedback; we've found the support quality there is really good. I'd like to learn more about where we fell short in your case. Could you forward any of the emails to me at michael@stripe.com? And if you have any other thoughts—about this or Stripe as a whole—I'd love to hear them as well!

gspleen 11y ago
We were informed that it was common and no trouble for you to accept a dataset and handle the import into your system. Upon pulling that dataset and waiting on several multi-day delays we were told that, oh, you don't do that in our case and that most clients just did it themselves over an API. Which we then did internally as a last minute item on a very tight, very big deadline. Just the sort of thing that's fun to do with client credit card data. Past that I'm not interested in giving out any more info about my company. EDIT: Wow. Sure am glad that I bothered to type up an honest answer.

jcrites 11y ago

> I'm not kidding. They believe it keeps everyone grounded or keeps everyone familiar with the product or some other malarkey. This is a good idea and I'd recommend it. Perhaps not as a mandatory forced rotation, but as something that everyone on a team is encouraged to contribute to. Understanding the customer experience, and their problems and day-to-day frustration, are extremely valuable for informing product development and business priorities generally. That said, if software engineers are doing it and it's not their primary job function, then I'd suggest that only where there's no SLA. Full time support is probably necessary for things that have an SLA (probably only an unpaid forums / IRC type of thing). Meeting a fast SLA while giving high quality responses is difficult, especially under high growth, and requires the attention of dedicated people who can be measured on it. But yes I've found involvement in the day to day customer experience to be beneficial and enlightening even for roles that don't directly interact with customers routinely. It helps you understand your customers. The best team will be one where everyone has a connection to and understands the customers, their problems, how the business helps them, and where it can improve.