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> nobody wants to pay for enough capable support staff, pay to keep the support staff at the ready often enough, pay support staff who want to stay in that role
by aianus 7y ago
> nobody wants to pay for enough capable support staff, pay to keep the support staff at the ready often enough, pay support staff who want to stay in that role
It's not about money. I worked at a unicorn that paid very high wages for support staff AND allowed them to work remotely and asynchronously from anywhere in the world. If you lived in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe you'd make more than a local doctor just answering emails.
We still simply couldn't hire enough halfway intelligent people fast enough to keep up with the user growth. For each support person we'd hire, there'd be 10,000 new customers joining the same week. "Automating that all away" was the only tractable way to respond to people at all in a reasonable time frame. Obviously the support quality was awful.
- duxup 7y agoI think it is about money... but also skilled leadership who understand how a good support organization works, how to find people and retain them. I suspect though that due to the general trend to look at support as a "cost" most skilled leadership has moved on or just settled for poor support practices and etc. Interestingly in my experience support teams that operate outside the home country of the company OFTEN have massive turnover issues, more than say domestic (wherever domestic is). There's a gap there that just never seems to fill in completely. There is also something to be said for managing support in the sense that you don't have to talk to every 10,000 customers ;)