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Highly doubt this scales past 30 employees unless your customer base is really small. Customer service should really be summarizing concerns, and you should ve

Highly doubt this scales past 30 employees unless your customer base is really small. Customer service should really be summarizing concerns, and you should verify the concerns by looking at data to see if it's really a concern worth alleviating.

wdewind 13y ago
Etsy does this (or did while I was still there) at 500+ employees. While they have dedicated CS reps, they also rotate everyone in the company. My experience with it was (literally) mixed. -As an eng I was frustrated by it because I felt it got in the way of "real work" (I don't know if this was right or wrong - it just felt frustrating at the time). -As a manager, I was frustrated by it because my engineers were constantly disappearing for customer support rotations. But then I watched one of my friends literally eliminate 400+ hours a month of customer support time (as well as the less measurable corresponding customer frustration) by writing a small tool in an hour only because he had that first person experience with the issue.
- punkrockpolly 13y ago
  I agree that there are benefits to cross-training employees, which is especially useful when they discover new better ways of doing things, or automate a process. The counter example can be developers who are bad "people persons" and might quit or dislike their job as a result this strategy. I think the important part is that the company is transparent about goals and takes employee feedback seriously.
- ziziyO 13y ago
  I had an inverted experience like this at my job. My job title is Technical Support. I do internal and external support for our company. We use Salesforce. By sheer luck I convinced my boss to allot me full system admin access to our Salesforce instance. I've gone to town improving our customer support workflow for our 100+ phone and e-mail reps by creating small tools and tweaks using Apex/VF Pages among other things. I had no prior experience with Salesforce when I first requested access. I'm no Salesforce Architect, but I have a great grasp on the internals of it now all because my boss had a little faith in me.
kevin 13y ago
37signals does this and they support a massive user base. http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3676-everyone-on-support http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3676-everyone-on-support

wdewind 13y ago

Etsy does this (or did while I was still there) at 500+ employees. While they have dedicated CS reps, they also rotate everyone in the company. My experience with it was (literally) mixed. -As an eng I was frustrated by it because I felt it got in the way of "real work" (I don't know if this was right or wrong - it just felt frustrating at the time). -As a manager, I was frustrated by it because my engineers were constantly disappearing for customer support rotations. But then I watched one of my friends literally eliminate 400+ hours a month of customer support time (as well as the less measurable corresponding customer frustration) by writing a small tool in an hour only because he had that first person experience with the issue.

punkrockpolly 13y ago
I agree that there are benefits to cross-training employees, which is especially useful when they discover new better ways of doing things, or automate a process. The counter example can be developers who are bad "people persons" and might quit or dislike their job as a result this strategy. I think the important part is that the company is transparent about goals and takes employee feedback seriously.
ziziyO 13y ago
I had an inverted experience like this at my job. My job title is Technical Support. I do internal and external support for our company. We use Salesforce. By sheer luck I convinced my boss to allot me full system admin access to our Salesforce instance. I've gone to town improving our customer support workflow for our 100+ phone and e-mail reps by creating small tools and tweaks using Apex/VF Pages among other things. I had no prior experience with Salesforce when I first requested access. I'm no Salesforce Architect, but I have a great grasp on the internals of it now all because my boss had a little faith in me.

kevin 13y ago

37signals does this and they support a massive user base. http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3676-everyone-on-support http://signalvnoise.com/posts/3676-everyone-on-support