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Everyone should read support emails

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Re: Everyone should read support emails

#31

Post by edelans »

scrollaway wrote: post #9

Fully agreed. I'll go a bit further: Everyone, especially engineers and PMs , should once in a while actually reply to support emails. As CTO of my previous company, I still found time for large amounts of customer support, and so did one of my cofounders. It's definitely important IMO for key people to be in contact with the userbase. Get a better look at what people are asking for, feel more directly responsible fo…

interesting ! Would you answer those support tickets as a CTO (I mean, with the title in the signature) or as a random support agent ?

question also works for PMs / devs / co-founders / ...

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#32

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

kbar13 wrote: post #28
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #24

Where I work dev team also does the L3 support: we have L1 who can change the password, reboot the computer, we have L2, who know the basics of our app and its surroundings, but if an issue is not obvious to them - here we come!

why does l1 even exist

Password changes, mouse cables pulled out, icons disappearing from the desktop after windows update and other stuff like that.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#33

Post by AznHisoka »

adwww wrote: post #2

"We can't give devs access to support, because [ZenDesk, FreshDesk, etc] costs 9 gazillion dollars per user"

ZenDesk and other help-desk software have to be the highest reward-to-effort SaaS startups ever built (from a founders point of view).

Simple CRUDs with non-complex infrastructure... that cost a boatload per client.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#35

Post by endofcapital »

nostrebored wrote: post #21

This is one of my favorite things about Amazon's support system. Support has direct access to PMs, developers, customer facing solutions architects and all of these orgs have close connections to the customers as a result. While not everyone has access to the support cases, customer sentiment is conveyed as part of this process and features or bug fixes are quickly roadmapped as a result of customer pain. The fact th…

I have reported and watched maybe half a dozen bugs get fixed on Amazon, starting in 2003 I think. Never even experienced a reply from any other company when trying to report problems over the years.

I think a handful of companies are getting more proactive with security reporting, but everyone still treats the quality of their services and front line support system as an afterthought.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#37

Post by badsectoracula »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #20
_carl_jung wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, such time pressure comes from management, not the developers themselves. This is evidenced by the painstaking effort a dev will go to to make their ultimate experience on a side project. In other words, users are often sidelined by new feature requests (for other users) rather than a selfish conservation of time by developers. The priority game is as yet unsolved, unless you can point me to contrary…

> In my experience, such time pressure comes from management In my experience, open source developers are just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to their treatment of users.

Yes, but open source developers are in their vast majority unpaid volunteers gifting their labor to other users, so these users can either accept the gift as it is or not accept and move on. They are not entitled to other people's work and time for free.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#38

Post by therealx »

kbar13 wrote: post #28
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #24

Where I work dev team also does the L3 support: we have L1 who can change the password, reboot the computer, we have L2, who know the basics of our app and its surroundings, but if an issue is not obvious to them - here we come!

why does l1 even exist

They are prob able to hire a cheap on call firm to handle it.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#39

Post by mgkimsal »

endofcapital wrote: post #35
nostrebored wrote: post #21

This is one of my favorite things about Amazon's support system. Support has direct access to PMs, developers, customer facing solutions architects and all of these orgs have close connections to the customers as a result. While not everyone has access to the support cases, customer sentiment is conveyed as part of this process and features or bug fixes are quickly roadmapped as a result of customer pain. The fact th…

I have reported and watched maybe half a dozen bugs get fixed on Amazon, starting in 2003 I think. Never even experienced a reply from any other company when trying to report problems over the years. I think a handful of companies are getting more proactive with security reporting, but everyone still treats the quality of their services and front line support system as an afterthought.

The customers are testers, especially in "break early, break often" scenarios. I wouldn't call them testers to their face, but... operationally, they're part of the loop. Treat them as such. If you're not going to pay for much testing up front, at least treat the real testers (customers/endusers) as part of a process, not as part of a problem.

If, when I reported an issue, and it was determined not to be PEBKAC... loop me in on updates, or followup with questions. I'm happy to try to reproduce issues, or give more details, or whatnot. I'm a user/customer - I want the product/service, and I want it to be better.

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