71–80 of 147 posts
That's a pretty bad title and I'm not going to click on it on principle.
It's a very accurate title. What would you prefer?
It is very, very difficult to offer phone support as a solo developer, particularly at low price points (below e.g. $5k per year) and for low tech-literacy customers. You can still do it, if you need someone to talk to, you want to do customer development, or you have a customer who strikes your fancy for non-market reasons, but you probably should not message the expectation that you're available.
I did it for 10 years, but more recently have moved away from phone support as much as possible (or delegated to others to do). The main reason - I am a solo developer. And the brain mode for 'developer' is VERY different from the brain mode for 'support agent'. It was basically impossible for me to get into 'flow' state during a normal working day. Even one phone call during the day took me away from my creative, pr…
Hi there! Support manager here. I've been leading support teams for years, led support QA teams, built troubleshooting processes and worked very closely with dev teams. A lot of what I wanted to bring up doesn't apply so much to solo dev's, but I want to vouch for non-devs and anyone that might start working on team. Support brains and developer brains are actually not that different. I see on HN way too often that d…
I do a lot of helpdesk. I've found out most of the time there is a huge difference in information availability between support desk and the rest of the company. Support people spend a ton of time and frustration finding out what the hell a client is talking about, who promised them things and where or what the hell the service level agreement is.
I made a lot of (account) managers very very angry by stating well written documentation and procedures should available to the entire support team. It should be a milestone of EVERY project or else there is NO finished project. People should not be held responsible because of lack of supplied information. Especially when they've asked for it a gazillion times.
This is one of the reason these teams hate each other so much in big companies.
I've been doing this for over 15 years with an invoicing app I have and I've got to know a lot users pretty well over that time. My app is simple and easy to use, and I've made "Training Videos" for just about everything you can do with, and I've had years to work out any bugs that have popped up, so I don't get a lot of calls anymore. But every call is a chance to learn something and improve the app and I pay very c…
I did it for 10 years, but more recently have moved away from phone support as much as possible (or delegated to others to do). The main reason - I am a solo developer. And the brain mode for 'developer' is VERY different from the brain mode for 'support agent'. It was basically impossible for me to get into 'flow' state during a normal working day. Even one phone call during the day took me away from my creative, pr…
> And the brain mode for 'developer' is VERY different from the brain mode for 'support agent'. This is something I can have trouble with even personally. I have noticed that when I get home from a long day of cold, analytical problem-solving, I mbrain bad at shifting my brain to empathetically listen and provide emotional support for my wifes problems.
I created a shareware Tetris clone for OS X in the mid 2000s and provided my cell number in the readme. I'd get a trickle of calls from all over the world at all times of day. That's where I learned never to have a serial number generator that included the number 0 since it looks so close to the letter 0. It was weird to be out and about and suddenly get a tech support call, but people were usually really nice.
I remember back in the early days of shareware and freeware apps and games where the developer would ask for a postcard if you enjoyed the app! If I ever develop something really small and useful one day I’d love to get post cards from around the world!
I'll be interested to read your follow-up post on the differences between offering phone support in Japanese and English. A few of the interactions you described here sounded distinctly Japanese to me.
A support agent at most tech companies will have to support multiple products in multiple languages and platforms and be ready to provide a useful response to a customer at any time, these responses could be:
Diagnosing code issues, Diagnosing product issues (internal or external) Writing code for the customer, Developing the customer use case, Working with Engineering, Finding some free time to learn new products, Training new agents
etc etc.
This is no easy task and shifting mindsets is sometimes tough.
I strongly echo the comments that documentation is key, if the product docs are written to be consumed by humans it's very helpful support engineers, we're lucky to have great documentation at the company I work so it makes our life easier.