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> a support person can fob a person off with "thank you for your feedback" and create an internal issue with no context, or I can talk to the customer myself, g

> a support person can fob a person off with "thank you for your feedback" and create an internal issue with no context, or I can talk to the customer myself, get a good idea of what problems they're running in to, and discus with them how to best fix it. As someone who's worked on both support and engineering teams, this bums me out. If your support engineers aren't making useful tickets on their own, maybe the exchange needs to go both ways.

Beltalowda 4y ago
Lack of quality on the tickets support created for us was indeed a bit of an issue. I don't know why; I got along pretty well with a lot of the support people and discussed it a few times over beers, this kind of friendly non-accusatory criticism was well received, but concretely things didn't really improve. It was also brought up in more formal settings a few times, also without much results. Maybe it's just the time pressure they had from having to meet targets? I don't really know how that part worked; in the end I was just a developer and didn't really have much insight in all of that. Another problem we had is that a lot of non-developers folk saw the developers as aircraft fighter pilots: super-special hotshots that you need to approach with caution. I'm not sure where that culture originated because none of the developers were very comfterable with that, but it was like that when I joined. I tried to change that, but with very limited success. Overall, it wasn't as bad as I make it sound here. A lot of the support folk were pretty good and most customers were happy with the support they got, but there were certainly some communication issues between support and development. Because I did a bit of support I also used the admin interface support used and made a few small improvements because some things were just awkward. Stuff like small layout improvements, adding a button so you don't have to click 5 times but just once, a basic search feature: real simple stuff I quickly did in-between other things (and usually looked ugly, but it worked). I was the hero of the support department because it was a major annoyance for them too, but ... they never told anyone, and never asked if that button could be added.

Beltalowda 4y ago

Lack of quality on the tickets support created for us was indeed a bit of an issue. I don't know why; I got along pretty well with a lot of the support people and discussed it a few times over beers, this kind of friendly non-accusatory criticism was well received, but concretely things didn't really improve. It was also brought up in more formal settings a few times, also without much results. Maybe it's just the time pressure they had from having to meet targets? I don't really know how that part worked; in the end I was just a developer and didn't really have much insight in all of that. Another problem we had is that a lot of non-developers folk saw the developers as aircraft fighter pilots: super-special hotshots that you need to approach with caution. I'm not sure where that culture originated because none of the developers were very comfterable with that, but it was like that when I joined. I tried to change that, but with very limited success. Overall, it wasn't as bad as I make it sound here. A lot of the support folk were pretty good and most customers were happy with the support they got, but there were certainly some communication issues between support and development. Because I did a bit of support I also used the admin interface support used and made a few small improvements because some things were just awkward. Stuff like small layout improvements, adding a button so you don't have to click 5 times but just once, a basic search feature: real simple stuff I quickly did in-between other things (and usually looked ugly, but it worked). I was the hero of the support department because it was a major annoyance for them too, but ... they never told anyone, and never asked if that button could be added.