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Because engineers are expensive, engineers that can talk to customers are even more expensive and decent engineers willing to do support are even more expensive
by flukus 9y ago
Because engineers are expensive, engineers that can talk to customers are even more expensive and decent engineers willing to do support are even more expensive.
That said, I do think software devs should be more involved with the customer for other reasons, far to often they are building software without having any idea what the customers workflow is.
- marcosdumay 9y agoWell, an entire support department that adds no value may indeed cost less, but losing your market because your product is defective (and you don't even know) can not be cheaper.
- mgkimsal 9y ago"expensive" can be relative. $100/hr but getting to the root of actual problems in, say, 2 days, and saving other customers from having the same issues in the future...
- shermozle 9y agoThe same reason forcing devs to do ops on their own product justifies having devs do (some of) their own customer support. Otherwise they just toss any old crap over the fence and it becomes somebody elses' problem. Force them to solve those problems and they magically go away, cos devs hate support.
- zamber 9y agoAt one project we had that pushed over to QA. We didn't have to touch it. Report a problem form sent an email to JIRA allowing us to scrape the influx of 400 daily reports for potential issues. It was pretty helpful in diagnosing a Samsung Android issue where our app was killed for no apparent reason (they have their own additional resource manager that scores apps and kills them UNLESS the app has a persistent notification).
- wastedhours 9y agoIf possible, teams should always "fix it twice" from support requests - get the customer sorted ASAP, and then determine if it's possible to solve the problem fully (either extra support documentation, patch, longer term feature etc...).