
Yes, everyone should do customer support - westonplatter0
http://westonplatter.com/2017/09/14/yes-everyone-should-do-support/
======
kruczek
I did that for a couple of years and I could agree that _occasionally_ it may
be useful for engineers to feel first-hand pains of the user. However in my
experience it quickly devolves into engineers spending whole days on customer
support, which is terribly expensive for the company and terribly
unfullfilling for employees.

The company pays significant money for the guy, who instead of creating
persistent value (in a form of software), spends days in meetings with
customers, clicking around their servers to setup the software or solve some
configuration issues.

The employee goes through boring and exhausting meetings with customers, and
after those few years feels completely burned out. Furthermore with most of
the time consumed by such meetings, any changes to the software will be done
ad hoc, without any further consideration, because there's no time for
consideration, when the customer always wants the change to be done ASAP.

The same job can be done much cheaper and by someone who actually enjoys day-
to-day interaction with customers.

~~~
westonplatter0
I didn't think anyone would read this, so I'm just seeing this. Thanks for the
comment.

Did you find a good rhythm / rotation to understand first-hand pains without
devoting all your time on customer support?

~~~
kruczek
Unfortunately no. The main problem was that we had absolutely no dedicated
customer support people - the boss disbanded them, because he saw them as
unnecessary wall between customers and engineers; he assumed that all cases
brought to CS are forwarded to engineers anyway, which was far from truth -
there were a lot of cases where problems were solved either by reconfiguration
of our software or by reconfiguration of customer's servers, both of which
would be advised by CS people, without engineers' involvement.

That means it was impossible for engineers to do customer support occasionally
- they had to do _all_ of it. And when a customer may call at any time, it is
hard to find any rhythm or rotation - development becomes a filler which is
added in between customer interactions.

------
amingilani
I work as the CTO for an ecommerce startup and I love handling support. I
identify problems with our current business process and come up with ways to
tune the tech to make them go away.

There's also the feeling I get when I calm an irate customer down only by
showing them that I care.

Working support keeps me connected to the most important stakeholders in our
business and I keep finding ways to improve their experience. I think everyone
should work support.

If you're not good on the phone, answer tickets. Ultimately it helps build a
company culture around customer satisfaction.

Then again, I could be wrong since it's only been about six months since we
started operations. I guess I'll know for sure in a year.

