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> If we fail to offer high-quality support, our business and reputation could suffer. I don't know how common this is in S-1 filings but it stuck out to me. Su

• krn 8y ago
  > Support is often viewed as a cost center Support is a cost-center for B2C companies, but one of the most important parts for B2B.
  • penagwin 8y ago
    Part of what Businesses pay for is support. Heck think of all the free databases/open source stuff that is funded not by the code but buy offering support/integration. EDIT: Funny though, as a consumer I'd pay a little more, say 20% more for my comcast bill if they had what I'd describe is "nice and helpful support", but if that was the case, my bill would likely be accurate, and we wouldn't have all these BS fees and charges showing up out of nowhere, which coincidentally can make my bill 20% higher then advertised.
    • zeroonetwothree 8y ago
      You can get Comcast Business service. That's basically what it is. They have very good support but costs a bit more.
  • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    It’s still usually viewed as a cost center by management in either case, and employees in support roles are notoriously underpaid, overworked and at risk of inexplicable layoffs. I would love to see more companies treat support technicians and customer support agents like prized human capital, give them good job security, don’t try to outsource or downsize them, and give them top class compensation to make them very proud to do the job.
    • jacobr1 8y ago
      Which is why managers in B2B support organization often start moving toward profserv ... which then creates a downward spiral in the value the core product provides.
  • kevinlou 8y ago
    Support is a cost-center for most B2C companies.
    • paulie_a 8y ago
      I would consider it a cost center like a developer fixing a released bug. It's necessary maintenance and when done right results in more profits This is another reason why everyone at a company should be a csr for a number of hours per month. From CEO to every developer.
  • FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
    Google would disagree.
• ultrasaurus 8y ago
  I can vouch that Support & Customer Success has always been a first class participant in the company. One of the founders ran the team when it was small, and Ryan has done a great job growing it out -- to the point where their #1 problem is other PD teams poaching their people into other roles in Product, Internal Tools, Engineering and even Sales :) (Disclaimer: I worked at PagerDuty for 7+ happy years)
• funkaster 8y ago
  True... but to be fair, prob most of the companies they serve, their support depends on PageDuty to be working correctly (othewise they would not get the alerts/notifications). So I would expect PageDuty to mark this a super high priority.
• evrydayhustling 8y ago
  More and more companies are also involving PagerDuty in their support! Incidents and multichannel escalation are great complements to standard support workflows for high impact cases.
• jmspring 8y ago
  Support as a cost center...it's an interesting thing. My first computer related job while in college was support for a variety of Borland products. There were a few of us interns that ended up doing the work of senior support engineers - writing white papers, running training, etc. Interns were the "cost cutting measure" back then. We were paid less, but knew the product and some evolved into well paid and challenging jobs with the company, some of us went elsewhere. Local labor was used instead of outsourcing overseas or bringing in lower-paid workers. At the time interns were paid pretty darn well.
  • lozaning 8y ago
    Im of the opinion that old support people make the best QA people and know quite a few you have made the transition very successfully.