

Kayak.com Makes Developers Do Customer Support - unfoldedorigami
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/the-way-i-work-paul-english-of-kayak_Printer_Friendly.html

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nanexcool
Great find, thanks! My favorite quote from this was:

"If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers,
the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop
what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions
anymore."

~~~
vaksel
that works as long as the company encourages this.

i.e. at my mom's job(she is also a programmer) she used to do these little
fixes for the users, and they all loved it. Then new management came in, and
now to do a little fix a user has to send in a request, which the programmer
needs to get signed off by 3 bosses.

And here is the funny part, the fix takes literally 5 minutes to do, boss #1
will say..."better tell the next boss it takes a few hours to give us some
breathing room', boss #2 will say..."better tell the next boss it takes a few
days, to make it seem like we are doing a lot of work" and boss #3 will say
"better tell the user it'll take a week, we want them to know that we are
doing major code for them"

So this tiny 5 minute code fix, that literally just required a change in a few
lines of code that used to be done in 5 minutes, now gets expanded into a 2
week "project"

THAT's the difference between a startup and corporate culture

~~~
icey
It's a two-way street. Bosses demand sign-offs because someone at some time
deployed something that didn't work. Signoff processes are there as a pain
avoidance technique.

If you are positive about the quality that goes out, you can have a corporate
culture that encourages this sort of thing. If you're in a company that feels
like it has to fill seats you get a combination of people who are good at
their job who have to deal with bureaucracy and people who aren't good at
their jobs who are saved by it.

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stlouisguy
He lives this. I once sent in some feedback via Kayak's web form, and got a
(brief) personal reply from Paul English within 24 hours.

> "We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does
> is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response
> out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us
> on our toes."

That's a clever little social hack.

~~~
thomas11
I see the idea, but you can take everything too far. To the entire company and
to all investors? Every day? Really? That's borderline fascist surveillance
regime.

~~~
FraaJad
The proof is in the pudding. Is Kayak keeping their customers happy. Are the
investors happy and of course are the employees happy? If the answer is yes,
then the approach works. Fascism is a strong word for a novel approach to
customer service. If this approach stops working then they will try something
else. This is not an ideology, you know.

~~~
thomas11
I didn't intend to say the method is fascist, just that it reminds of
practices that were and are employed by fascist regimes. If everyone's happy,
then there's of course no reason to complain. I just don't see how employees
could be happy under a system like this, but to each his own.

~~~
robfitz
Part of their job is to write reasonable responses to customer inquiries.
That's the output of their working time, for which they are paid.

Saying that should be private is like saying someone's code check-ins should
be private.

And if we assume people are good rather than bad, it's a chance to show off,
without ego, a particularly good response and/or responder. That gives them a
morale boost from knowing their boss and co-workers saw them doing a good job
in a natural environment, and it motivates co-workers to do a similarly
admirable side.

------
kungfooey
As a developer, I'm not so sure that I buy this. I mean, I get it, developers
are going to know how to deal with the bugs much quicker than a customer
would. But does it scale well? If I was constantly interrupted by a loudly
ringing code I can assure you that my code is going to be a poorer quality
than if I had been able to work on it undistracted. So distractions lead to
bad code leads to more distractions... that could be a really vicious cycle.

As someone else pointed out, you have to judge the process by its fruits. It
looks like it's working for them, but it would drive me crazy.

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ShabbyDoo
This page seems to randomly show the feedback phone number:

<http://www.kayak.com/feedback>

Hit refresh a few times.

Perhaps they don't like the phone ringing that much after all?

~~~
DenisM
This is clever. You want to have some amount of personal feedback to learn
about customers, but you also want to be efficient about handling he bulk of
the support issues.

------
tdmackey
"On any given day, you might find him tracking down potential hires, going for
a run with his software engineers, or personally answering calls to Kayak's
customer hotline." <\- what is this? software engineers don't run ;)

Honestly, he seems very down to earth and genuinely happy. I also like how he
doesn't have a problem constantly checking his email unlike all these
productivity blogs and such saying its the worst thing you could ever do. I
feel my behavior is somewhat vindicated in being one of those differences that
doesn't really make a difference.

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jerryji
I welcome the idea and practice so wholeheartedly that I feel the use of word
"make" in the title is inappropriate.

It implies that the developers at Kayak.com are forced to do something outside
of their responsibility -- it certainly would sound stupid to say "XYZ.com
Makes Developers Do Proper Coding", however, both practice lead to the same
outcome -- better product.

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jakez
Cool article! Although for me what stood out in the article was not that he
made his developers do customer support, it was his work ethic and his outlook
on life.

I like it that he advocates "work really hard for 40 to 45 hours a week, but
we believe in people having strong personal lives". Makes for a more balanced
life and ultimately a more sustainable company.

------
ShabbyDoo
Rather than hoping that employees recognize patterns in customer
communications, it might be better for a group of employees to review a
sampling of emails and figure out some common root causes. Perhaps they
already do this...

