81–90 of 214 posts
If you need help migrating to another platform, please shoot me an email.
One great thing my company does is put a prominent link on the intranet homepage where anyone in the company can schedule a 1 hour shadowing session with customer support. You don't need a reason and within a few hours you've got time scheduled within the next few days. I think the whole process was actually driven by support as they wanted the rest of company to know what they do and see what they see.
This is why we regularly take developers to customers. It is eye-opening to see on-site that your mobile app with tiny but well-designed buttons doesn't work for registering container positions when the user is in a shaky 90 metric tons weighing machine, handling 30 metric ton containers. We write software for container terminal and other logistical actors, and seeing the software being used by real users is so incre…
I think that's valuable, but depends on the organization. At a company I worked at engineering used to go on customer visits, but the "customers" were the executives and managers who make buying decisions and put forth requirements. However, these were not the folks who actually used the product. Their opinion was important (gotta sell it) but it was NOTHING like what we saw in support. The the few times end users we…
As much as possible we try to bring a person from Product (dev + design + PM) to be involved in the launch project. The benefit here is that the product team gets direct access to the users. And they get "early access" to the challenges our customers face: in the early days of using a new product, the issues shine very bright compared to later when the users have found a suitable workaround. This has and will certainly continue to be essential to building empathy between the people who build the product and those who use it.
"We can't give devs access to support, because [ZenDesk, FreshDesk, etc] costs 9 gazillion dollars per user"
For that exact reason I've had a weekly "emails and chill" date with a supporter. Brought coffee for both of us. I flicked through incoming support emails for 30-40 minutes....
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…
While reading the article, I got a feeling that reading support emails is only one step away from answering support emails - and here you are, suggesting just that. I've seen further steps down this road - if there are engineers already answering support emails, then why do we need support people at all. After all, engineers have better knowledge of technical details and can make changes themselves. No need for inter…
I didn’t get that impression. The article mentioned reading these emails for 30m a week. Going from there to doing tech support yourself as a CTO is...
It seems to me that a CTO doing tech support either understand something I really don’t, or really fails to understand something I do. Superficially, it sounds like the sort of low-level digging around you get from engineers that got the CTO title but never got comfortable with the transition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They had an online complaint form, but you were only able to use it on workdays between 0900 and 1600. Was it an interactive form with immediate feedback? I'm trying to figure out a way to justify hours on a feedback form.
They promised feedback within a couple of hours. Even so, I see no reason to limit it in this manner, just tell them you'll to to get back the same day or the first workday...
Since the article author appears to be the submitter: you should quit Medium. It's not helping your content when a full-page popup obscures it and entices your users away to a sign-up page, then keeps nagging them with popup nagbars on either end of the page. If you need help migrating to another platform, please shoot me an email.
- If you run a business targeting the enterprise, have everyone on the management team go on a sales call once a quarter. Often the CFO will not actually understand what the product is, much less how customers think of it.
- If you have sales people making cold calls have management listen in on a few. Again, you'll see how people think of your message.
Since the article author appears to be the submitter: you should quit Medium. It's not helping your content when a full-page popup obscures it and entices your users away to a sign-up page, then keeps nagging them with popup nagbars on either end of the page. If you need help migrating to another platform, please shoot me an email.
Not the OP, and I don’t disagree re: the nightmare Medium has (predictably) become. But I’d love to know what platform would you suggest?