4 ms·

Yes, everyone should do customer support

amingilani 9y ago
I work as the CTO for an ecommerce startup and I love handling support. I identify problems with our current business process and come up with ways to tune the tech to make them go away. There's also the feeling I get when I calm an irate customer down only by showing them that I care. Working support keeps me connected to the most important stakeholders in our business and I keep finding ways to improve their experience. I think everyone should work support. If you're not good on the phone, answer tickets. Ultimately it helps build a company culture around customer satisfaction. Then again, I could be wrong since it's only been about six months since we started operations. I guess I'll know for sure in a year.
kruczek 9y ago
I did that for a couple of years and I could agree that occasionally it may be useful for engineers to feel first-hand pains of the user. However in my experience it quickly devolves into engineers spending whole days on customer support, which is terribly expensive for the company and terribly unfullfilling for employees. The company pays significant money for the guy, who instead of creating persistent value (in a form of software), spends days in meetings with customers, clicking around their servers to setup the software or solve some configuration issues. The employee goes through boring and exhausting meetings with customers, and after those few years feels completely burned out. Furthermore with most of the time consumed by such meetings, any changes to the software will be done ad hoc, without any further consideration, because there's no time for consideration, when the customer always wants the change to be done ASAP. The same job can be done much cheaper and by someone who actually enjoys day-to-day interaction with customers.
- westonplatter0 9y ago
  I didn't think anyone would read this, so I'm just seeing this. Thanks for the comment. Did you find a good rhythm / rotation to understand first-hand pains without devoting all your time on customer support?
  - kruczek 9y ago
    Unfortunately no. The main problem was that we had absolutely no dedicated customer support people - the boss disbanded them, because he saw them as unnecessary wall between customers and engineers; he assumed that all cases brought to CS are forwarded to engineers anyway, which was far from truth - there were a lot of cases where problems were solved either by reconfiguration of our software or by reconfiguration of customer's servers, both of which would be advised by CS people, without engineers' involvement. That means it was impossible for engineers to do customer support occasionally - they had to do all of it. And when a customer may call at any time, it is hard to find any rhythm or rotation - development becomes a filler which is added in between customer interactions.

I work as the CTO for an ecommerce startup and I love handling support. I identify problems with our current business process and come up with ways to tune the tech to make them go away. There's also the feeling I get when I calm an irate customer down only by showing them that I care. Working support keeps me connected to the most important stakeholders in our business and I keep finding ways to improve their experience. I think everyone should work support. If you're not good on the phone, answer tickets. Ultimately it helps build a company culture around customer satisfaction. Then again, I could be wrong since it's only been about six months since we started operations. I guess I'll know for sure in a year.

kruczek 9y ago

I did that for a couple of years and I could agree that occasionally it may be useful for engineers to feel first-hand pains of the user. However in my experience it quickly devolves into engineers spending whole days on customer support, which is terribly expensive for the company and terribly unfullfilling for employees. The company pays significant money for the guy, who instead of creating persistent value (in a form of software), spends days in meetings with customers, clicking around their servers to setup the software or solve some configuration issues. The employee goes through boring and exhausting meetings with customers, and after those few years feels completely burned out. Furthermore with most of the time consumed by such meetings, any changes to the software will be done ad hoc, without any further consideration, because there's no time for consideration, when the customer always wants the change to be done ASAP. The same job can be done much cheaper and by someone who actually enjoys day-to-day interaction with customers.

westonplatter0 9y ago
I didn't think anyone would read this, so I'm just seeing this. Thanks for the comment. Did you find a good rhythm / rotation to understand first-hand pains without devoting all your time on customer support?
- kruczek 9y ago
  Unfortunately no. The main problem was that we had absolutely no dedicated customer support people - the boss disbanded them, because he saw them as unnecessary wall between customers and engineers; he assumed that all cases brought to CS are forwarded to engineers anyway, which was far from truth - there were a lot of cases where problems were solved either by reconfiguration of our software or by reconfiguration of customer's servers, both of which would be advised by CS people, without engineers' involvement. That means it was impossible for engineers to do customer support occasionally - they had to do all of it. And when a customer may call at any time, it is hard to find any rhythm or rotation - development becomes a filler which is added in between customer interactions.