All Hands Support • Hacker News Board

Re: All Hands Support

#11

Post by brendan » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 8:43 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #7

mjpizz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

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.

Re: All Hands Support

#12

Post by jeffclark » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 8:43 PM UTC

mjpizz wrote: post #10

jeffclark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sure, that would be ideal. But as an engineer, are you even remotely interested in learning good customer service skills... or making sure the site doesn't come crashing down in an hour?

sure, as far as "job responsibilities" go, I agree that keeping the site running trumps answering support emails. That's the primary job of an engineer or ops guy/gal. But hopefully urgent events like this aren't the hour-to-hour norm for a company. To answer the first half of your question: as an engineer myself, I am personally very invested in good customer service skills. Admittedly, doing a startup (vs. being pa…

Totally understandable, especially in a startup area.

This specific case is my day job. We're still startupy-ish, but a little more established (you've definitely heard of us). We have a support team and all that, and the engineers are working on new features and scaling more-so than bug fixes.

I (of course) am working on my own thing and handle 99% of the customer service on it - not only because I want my customers to be happy, but just like you said, I want to work on what really pains my customers.

Re: All Hands Support

#13

Post by sp332 » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 8:59 PM UTC

brendan wrote: post #11

sp332 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

So you would, eventually, get around to asking the user to use another browser? Just not as abruptly?

Re: All Hands Support

#14

Post by brendan » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 9:02 PM UTC

mjpizz wrote: post #10

jeffclark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sure, that would be ideal. But as an engineer, are you even remotely interested in learning good customer service skills... or making sure the site doesn't come crashing down in an hour?

sure, as far as "job responsibilities" go, I agree that keeping the site running trumps answering support emails. That's the primary job of an engineer or ops guy/gal. But hopefully urgent events like this aren't the hour-to-hour norm for a company. To answer the first half of your question: as an engineer myself, I am personally very invested in good customer service skills. Admittedly, doing a startup (vs. being pa…

Right on. I'm an engineer (and one of the founders of Wistia), and I really enjoy talking to customers and doing support. I can understand that this type of behavior might not be typical, but it's such a huge advantage to have the people building the product interacting directly with the people who are using/buying it. I love it.

Re: All Hands Support

#15

Post by brendan » Fri, Aug 20, 2010, 9:12 PM UTC

brendan wrote: post #11

sp332 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: All Hands Support

#16

Post by blahblahblah » Sat, Aug 21, 2010, 12:06 AM UTC

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.