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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.