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Everyone should read support emails

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Re: Everyone should read support emails

#101

Post by gist »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #61
achow wrote: post #27

The day Bill Gates answered a support call https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...

I'm very skeptic that the customer would believe it was actually Bill Gates that took his call. I could imagine it if it was a grandma or grandpa (or similar, you get the idea)... but then she wouldn't know who Bill Gates was anyways.

Bill could be all nice, calm, and helpful because he is not sitting there every day taking calls from end users having to actually work according to some metrics and deal with aggravation.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#102

Post by tempexamzn0304 »

ValentineC wrote: post #92
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…

> 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. This only works if they know how to convey the relevant issues to the right developers properly. I had some large files on my Amazon Drive (the consumer product) which could never be downloaded v…

> This only works if they know how to convey the relevant issues to the right developers properly.

100% this. I don't know that it was like this across the company, but the way customer-facing issues were escalated to my group was pretty awful and almost always mishandled. Customer tickets landing in the same queues as host/service auto-generated tickets, bad handoffs and prioritization, devs with no support experience asking for way too much information from non-technical people just trying to use the service. I suppose the first-line support org is to blame in part. Though it wasn't one of the hotter products they offer, it was definitely old enough and nearly foundational to have warranted several more subject matter experts on the support side. Seeing them tout themselves as one of the most customer-centric companies out there was flabbergasting when it came to that org.

(Source, used to eat bananas)

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#103

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

How do you prevent this from becoming another stream of continuous disruptions that prevent knowledge workers from having enough sustained, concentrated time to develop big picture solutions?

Obviously you want to prioritize work to address what adds value for the customer. But can you really do that if everyone has to be constantly disrupting their work to scan incoming streams of idiosyncratic support requests? That doesn’t make sense to me.

I’m all for cultivating empathy for the customer and keeping people informed, but why does that need to be based on a constant inflowing stream of requests, as opposed to a monthly customer-focused all-hands meeting or something?

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#104

Post by toast0 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #33
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.

It really depends. The per seat cost for ZenDesk is pretty low; if you have an efficient process, it can be a lot of effort for them. My work's support people are very efficient, so we were processing tons of tickets and bogging down their infra. We ended up building our own ticketing to get the performance we need.

On the topic of reading support email; I think it's important that developers regularly have tickets escalated to them, and regularly hear about the trending issues; but that doesn't mean they need to spend a day in the queue. Processing support email is a skill that needs training and practice to do well; it's not something an engineer can do once a month or a few times a year with good results. Of course, this may depend on the scale of your support queue and of your team; there's a big difference in a few emails per developer per day and thousands per day.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#105

Post by scrollaway »

edelans wrote: post #31
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 / ...

Never signed anything other than with a name.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#107

Post by Nimitz14 »

gist wrote: post #99
achow wrote: post #27

The day Bill Gates answered a support call https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...

I get a kick out of stories like that but I would wonder about this: >Bill Gates is being taken on a guided tour of the product support department's new office building, and during his visit, he asks one of the people manning the phones, "Mind if I take this call?" In particular "Mind if I take this call?". Mind? The entire idea of the head of a corporation (such as Microsoft in particular) asking permission in that…

It's called being polite.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#108

Post by xhruso00 »

Most of the support emails are really dumb. Instead of reading product description or help they simply write you email and ask you. 98% of users get through intuitive design. Example1: Customer didn't know how to switch camera back/front and the product used the same icon and approach as Apple. Example2: Customer denied access to camera and asked at support why camera doesn't work.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#109

Post by [deleted] »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #61
achow wrote: post #27

The day Bill Gates answered a support call https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=...

I'm very skeptic that the customer would believe it was actually Bill Gates that took his call. I could imagine it if it was a grandma or grandpa (or similar, you get the idea)... but then she wouldn't know who Bill Gates was anyways.

[deleted]

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#110

Post by ColdBrewSea »

xhruso00 wrote: post #108

Most of the support emails are really dumb. Instead of reading product description or help they simply write you email and ask you. 98% of users get through intuitive design. Example1: Customer didn't know how to switch camera back/front and the product used the same icon and approach as Apple. Example2: Customer denied access to camera and asked at support why camera doesn't work.

These sound like legitimate user experience problems. I have fallen into the trap of example 2 at least once, not because I didn't know why the camera didn't work, but I didn't know how to resolve it at the time.
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