

All Hands Support - mjpizz
http://wistia.com/blog/all-hands-support/

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blahblahblah
Sounds like a terrible idea to me. You're using your most precious (and
expensive) human resources to do a task that doesn't require them. Part of the
function of ITIL practices in the support team (assuming you're large enough
to have a support team) is to notice trends in help desk calls and feature
requests, condense that information, and present it to the development team in
an organized, coherent manner. If that's not enough to keep your developers
grounded in reality, send some of them on site visits once in a while to
observe real users trying to do real work with your software.

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callmeed
"All hands support" (provided by engineers) is cool and all, but ONLY IF your
product/service is targeted at other engineers or highly technical users (like
Wistia and New Relic).

Support for B2C or B2[Brick and Mortar]B services is a different animal, IMO,
and one that many startups don't get.

~~~
jeffclark
Seriously. If you're not dealing with another engineer/developer/tech-y, you
should reconsider having your engineers interact with the public.

Actual entire response from one of our (very smart, social and senior)
engineers recently to a customer who couldn't login:

"Hi (customer): I can't recognize the web browser you are using! Can you
possibly try to login with one of our supported browsers and let me know if
you still have a problem? -(engineer)"

Sure, it's exactly what he needs to know to start fixing the issue, but
there's no chance the customer (a florist) is going to know how to respond to
that. We're just wired differently.

~~~
mjpizz
great illustrative story. But couldn't this be more a matter of learning good
customer service skills, not a matter of intrinsically being "wired
differently" as an engineer vs. non-engineer?

~~~
sp332
The engineer thinks of the problem as a technical problem with a technical
solution: wrong browser, switch browsers. Simple!

Out of curiosity, how would someone with good customer skills handle this
situation?

~~~
brendan
In my experience, the best response is one in which you make it clear that you
personally care about the customer's problem and will do your best to get it
resolved quickly. This trumps everything else, so long as it's the truth. If
your engineers don't actually care about your customers' problems, then having
them do support will only hurt your business.

~~~
brendan
If it comes down to that, yes. Though I'd first try to track down their
requests in the logs and see if it's something we can fix on our end.

Obviously, some companies make a conscious decision not to support all
browsers, so there might be no way around it in that case.

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johngalt
Sounds great when you're small, but "All-Hands Support" self-destructs when
you try to scale it.

