5 ms·

It's weird that $15-18/hour is considered pricey, when you could get 3-4 support staff per run-of-the-mill SF developer salary. "All I want is someone who has

by vacri 10y ago

It's weird that $15-18/hour is considered pricey, when you could get 3-4 support staff per run-of-the-mill SF developer salary. "All I want is someone who has the social skills to talk to clients, technical skills to be familiar with the stack, and the nous to troubleshoot issues based on the partial info that clients provide!" Support sucks. You get the short end of the stick from everyone - clients, management, developers - and there's little in the way of benefits for doing so. No wonder there's a high turnover in the field.

fapi1974 10y ago
I have to say I think your comment is an insightful one. Few companies see support as a way to differentiate themselves. But if you think of the really transformative companies they think of customer service as a competitive advantage. The way I put it to our clients is: think of all the money you spend begging customers to engage with you - tv advertising, online ads, events, yada. Then you literally have someone on the phone and they want to talk. Maybe for an unhappy reason but they want to talk! Is it at exactly that point that you decide to minimize the conversation? It makes little sense. Instead when you have them on the phone you could literally make their day, in a million different ways. And it's totally under your control.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  If they're so valuable, why are companies like yours trying to keep the customer support people from getting the benefits that the rest of the people working for the company getting? Those people need to eat too, those people are taking risks too, those people have families, have dreams. Your service just furthers the problem of why so many non-technical people struggle in this area.
  - fapi1974 10y ago
    This is a tough question but I don't want to duck it. There is no question that any company creates value by taking advantage of a pricing difference - whether it's the price of labor as measured in wages and benefits, or the cost of making a widget using a new technology, or something else. The reason I feel good about what we do is that I feel like we are helping spread some of the [highly concentrated!] economic wellbeing from the Bay Area to other places that can benefit more from it on the margin. That's totally separate from how rough it is for lower skilled folks in high cost markets to make ends meet...which is a real problem, I agree.
    - Sanddancer 10y ago
      No, what you're doing is further stratifying this country. You don't offer any opportunities to advance. You don't offer the benefits you offer your programmers. You take advantage of income disparity. You take advantage of people who are in smaller towns. If you really wanted to take that well-being and spread it, you'd offer stock options, you'd offer them decent insurance, you'd offer them a future.
      - pmichaud 10y ago
        I have no skin in this game, but it seems to me that you're being unfair. There's a story that goes around the nonprofit sector about activists stopping sweatshops in developing nations. The wages there are terrible, the working conditions inhumane. So it's good that they stopped the sweat shops from existing. Right? Well, they went and checked some time later, to measure the effects of the change. It turned out that the children who had been working at those inhumane sweatshops had turned to the next best alternative: Child prostitution. (Here's a link with sources to back this up: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hcp/seeking_reliable_evidence_claim_that_closing/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hcp/seeking_reliable_evidence_claim_...) It seems like your argument has the same structure. I don't know anything about People Delight, but if it's the case that this is the business model that makes it economically feasible to provide jobs to people for whom those jobs are the best option, then I think it would be a mistake to force those jobs out of existence because the jobs couldn't provide even more benefit to the workers than they currently do. I want everyone, everywhere to have all they need and want, and to live happy lives on their own terms. It just seems like you're being unfair to fapi1974 by asking him to do it singlehandedly.
        Sanddancer 10y ago
        This is the fallacy of the broken window, and not the entire story. After the mistake in Bangladesh, the activists learned from their mistakes, and the next country got rid of sweatshops, plus provided education and stipends for the children so that they didn't have to go into those poor situations. This isn't about forcing those jobs to go away. This is about keeping companies from exploiting these workers. The workers that People Delight are exploiting don't get the benefits tech firms bandy about so freely, can't unionize, don't get the opportunities to advance. There is money to be made there without exploiting, but things don't get better unless you criticize the people doing the exploiting.
jtmcmc 10y ago
If they're expecting actual technical support staff (people who have a technical ability as well as client facing abilities) to work for 15-18/hr they're insane. Again outsourcing that sort of support is equally difficult for the same reasons outsourcing engineering is difficult with the added bonus they need to be effective communicators, generally in english.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  You can get that in low-cost areas where there's more smart people than IT jobs. A nearby city has all kinds of technical people working at that or similarly low rates. They usually have accessed to a higher-paid person who does the real, heavy lifting when it's necessary. It's usually not, though. The cheap, young people learn more as they go with constant turnover but a steady number staying at any given time to train or help newest. Also, many companies start people aiming at better jobs in such support roles claiming it's the grind that "everyone goes through." ;) If they don't want that, they can try to get one of the few, high-paying jobs in specialist work with almost no experience or take the risk of a move on whatever college or broke people have saved up. Most take the local job at least to start with.
- erader 10y ago
  You're right, I've seen the type of Orgs in SF where 15-18/hr is the base wage and it's not healthy (for the organization or the people who are working there). For the most part, I've seen that the type of Orgs with those support wages are likely just trying to throw bodies at support volume. $16/hr for another human to answer X amount of tickets with a Y% satisfaction over Z amount of time. Their customer base is probably B2C or B2B with a large SMB base. The model is bound to fail, particularly for communication reasons. The type of Org that employs this position is also likely to not have the product feedback loops that connect Support (reactive) with the Product/Eng teams (proactive...hopeuflly). This means product is not addressing bugs quickly or fixing usability issues that support agents frequently work around and explain to frustrated users. It also means they likely don't have adequate internal tooling to solve problems in real-time. It's a form of technical debt that is REALLY hard to measure - I believe this is because there's too much focus on "standard" support metrics like NPS, FRT, # of touches... Yes these are important, but they are surface level stats for maintaining a basic, "good" support experience. Great support experiences require tighter integration with other teams with better data. There's no one right answer, but likely a spectrum of options that need to be analyzed for which works best for you. - Have an international customer base? Maybe outsourcing could be a great option to keep costs low and cover more timezones - Not interested in outsourcing? Stay in the US and build a new office with talent outside the Bay Area (check out Lyft's Nashville office) - Do you absolutely need Support to be in HQ? Make the commitment to higher wages and staying lean and effective, not just as a Support team but as 1 company together.
jsudhams 10y ago
Even to run this setup in India and Philippines it is too tight provided we expect some profit after giving salary to employee. But if this can be upped to about 20$ then you can get excellent support provided the telephony cost(acd etc) is born by the company. If anyone interested in long term(2+ years contract) up to 20+ agents with 20% turnover for day shift and 40% turn over for night shift then contact me
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tomcam 10y ago
Well I just learned the word nous, which means intelligence or ability in this context.
twblalock 10y ago
> Support sucks. You get the short end of the stick from everyone - clients, management, developers - and there's little in the way of benefits for doing so. No wonder there's a high turnover in the field. This is because support departments are viewed as cost centers, not profit centers. People who work in cost centers generally get treated badly. If their manager can figure out how to lay them off without affecting customer retention, it's gonna happen.

by vacri 10y ago

fapi1974 10y ago

I have to say I think your comment is an insightful one. Few companies see support as a way to differentiate themselves. But if you think of the really transformative companies they think of customer service as a competitive advantage. The way I put it to our clients is: think of all the money you spend begging customers to engage with you - tv advertising, online ads, events, yada. Then you literally have someone on the phone and they want to talk. Maybe for an unhappy reason but they want to talk! Is it at exactly that point that you decide to minimize the conversation? It makes little sense. Instead when you have them on the phone you could literally make their day, in a million different ways. And it's totally under your control.

Sanddancer 10y ago
If they're so valuable, why are companies like yours trying to keep the customer support people from getting the benefits that the rest of the people working for the company getting? Those people need to eat too, those people are taking risks too, those people have families, have dreams. Your service just furthers the problem of why so many non-technical people struggle in this area.
- fapi1974 10y ago
  This is a tough question but I don't want to duck it. There is no question that any company creates value by taking advantage of a pricing difference - whether it's the price of labor as measured in wages and benefits, or the cost of making a widget using a new technology, or something else. The reason I feel good about what we do is that I feel like we are helping spread some of the [highly concentrated!] economic wellbeing from the Bay Area to other places that can benefit more from it on the margin. That's totally separate from how rough it is for lower skilled folks in high cost markets to make ends meet...which is a real problem, I agree.
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    No, what you're doing is further stratifying this country. You don't offer any opportunities to advance. You don't offer the benefits you offer your programmers. You take advantage of income disparity. You take advantage of people who are in smaller towns. If you really wanted to take that well-being and spread it, you'd offer stock options, you'd offer them decent insurance, you'd offer them a future.
    - pmichaud 10y ago
      I have no skin in this game, but it seems to me that you're being unfair. There's a story that goes around the nonprofit sector about activists stopping sweatshops in developing nations. The wages there are terrible, the working conditions inhumane. So it's good that they stopped the sweat shops from existing. Right? Well, they went and checked some time later, to measure the effects of the change. It turned out that the children who had been working at those inhumane sweatshops had turned to the next best alternative: Child prostitution. (Here's a link with sources to back this up: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hcp/seeking_reliable_evidence_claim_that_closing/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/hcp/seeking_reliable_evidence_claim_...) It seems like your argument has the same structure. I don't know anything about People Delight, but if it's the case that this is the business model that makes it economically feasible to provide jobs to people for whom those jobs are the best option, then I think it would be a mistake to force those jobs out of existence because the jobs couldn't provide even more benefit to the workers than they currently do. I want everyone, everywhere to have all they need and want, and to live happy lives on their own terms. It just seems like you're being unfair to fapi1974 by asking him to do it singlehandedly.
      - Sanddancer 10y ago
        This is the fallacy of the broken window, and not the entire story. After the mistake in Bangladesh, the activists learned from their mistakes, and the next country got rid of sweatshops, plus provided education and stipends for the children so that they didn't have to go into those poor situations. This isn't about forcing those jobs to go away. This is about keeping companies from exploiting these workers. The workers that People Delight are exploiting don't get the benefits tech firms bandy about so freely, can't unionize, don't get the opportunities to advance. There is money to be made there without exploiting, but things don't get better unless you criticize the people doing the exploiting.

jtmcmc 10y ago

If they're expecting actual technical support staff (people who have a technical ability as well as client facing abilities) to work for 15-18/hr they're insane. Again outsourcing that sort of support is equally difficult for the same reasons outsourcing engineering is difficult with the added bonus they need to be effective communicators, generally in english.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
You can get that in low-cost areas where there's more smart people than IT jobs. A nearby city has all kinds of technical people working at that or similarly low rates. They usually have accessed to a higher-paid person who does the real, heavy lifting when it's necessary. It's usually not, though. The cheap, young people learn more as they go with constant turnover but a steady number staying at any given time to train or help newest. Also, many companies start people aiming at better jobs in such support roles claiming it's the grind that "everyone goes through." ;) If they don't want that, they can try to get one of the few, high-paying jobs in specialist work with almost no experience or take the risk of a move on whatever college or broke people have saved up. Most take the local job at least to start with.
erader 10y ago
You're right, I've seen the type of Orgs in SF where 15-18/hr is the base wage and it's not healthy (for the organization or the people who are working there). For the most part, I've seen that the type of Orgs with those support wages are likely just trying to throw bodies at support volume. $16/hr for another human to answer X amount of tickets with a Y% satisfaction over Z amount of time. Their customer base is probably B2C or B2B with a large SMB base. The model is bound to fail, particularly for communication reasons. The type of Org that employs this position is also likely to not have the product feedback loops that connect Support (reactive) with the Product/Eng teams (proactive...hopeuflly). This means product is not addressing bugs quickly or fixing usability issues that support agents frequently work around and explain to frustrated users. It also means they likely don't have adequate internal tooling to solve problems in real-time. It's a form of technical debt that is REALLY hard to measure - I believe this is because there's too much focus on "standard" support metrics like NPS, FRT, # of touches... Yes these are important, but they are surface level stats for maintaining a basic, "good" support experience. Great support experiences require tighter integration with other teams with better data. There's no one right answer, but likely a spectrum of options that need to be analyzed for which works best for you. - Have an international customer base? Maybe outsourcing could be a great option to keep costs low and cover more timezones - Not interested in outsourcing? Stay in the US and build a new office with talent outside the Bay Area (check out Lyft's Nashville office) - Do you absolutely need Support to be in HQ? Make the commitment to higher wages and staying lean and effective, not just as a Support team but as 1 company together.

jsudhams 10y ago

Even to run this setup in India and Philippines it is too tight provided we expect some profit after giving salary to employee. But if this can be upped to about 20$ then you can get excellent support provided the telephony cost(acd etc) is born by the company. If anyone interested in long term(2+ years contract) up to 20+ agents with 20% turnover for day shift and 40% turn over for night shift then contact me

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

tomcam 10y ago

Well I just learned the word nous, which means intelligence or ability in this context.

twblalock 10y ago

> Support sucks. You get the short end of the stick from everyone - clients, management, developers - and there's little in the way of benefits for doing so. No wonder there's a high turnover in the field. This is because support departments are viewed as cost centers, not profit centers. People who work in cost centers generally get treated badly. If their manager can figure out how to lay them off without affecting customer retention, it's gonna happen.