111–120 of 214 posts
We need to understand customers the way we understand our program. deep dive and debug their issues and come out with a solution that is win-win.
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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…
I've worked on several projects where the actual needs would get distorted between the customers and the developers in a perverse game of telephone. Each producer or manager feeling the need to reinterpret as they saw fit.
He wasn't wrong ;)
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> 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 experien…
Interesting story!
Take it one further: everyone should do support, not just read the emails. 1 day per month or so should do the job, it puts everybody in a good position to appreciate that if they don't do their work properly the support people end up taking the heat. So do not just read the emails, answer them, make it work for the end-user and spot the dysfunctional bits in your organization first hand.
That's a really fast way to burn out your entire team.
Devs don't necessarily have good communication or people skills. They haven't been trained to respond politely when someone sends them a screaming, all-caps e-mail that their product is garbage. That's my job as the Support Engineer.
Be careful, it can be demoralizing for engineers working on the product as you can get the feeling that nothing works.
I would presume most competent engineers have a pretty good grasp of what is or isn't working. If something doesn't, they probably knew about it already, or at least aren't surprised.
When I was at Square the design team would shadow support staff to learn about the kind of problems people are facing and more importantly how people talk about your products, i.e. what they call things, how they try to explain what's gone wrong, what they did to solve it or how they ended up with the problem to begin with. It's the closest thing you can come to true realistic user-testing.
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…
"Mind if I..." would be a normal, polite thing to say in such a situation.
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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.
Let's imagine someone is doing heavy labor and digging ditches. More appropriate to just say 'let me do that for you'. Rather than 'mind if I do that for you'.
Bill must know it's not a great job to take support calls constantly and deal with the aggravation. No doubt that there are people (like with any job) that like the job and are fine with it. But those are most likely not people that Bill associates with, is friends with, or respects. The contrast between the parties is where the 'patronizing' comes in.
Another example is a Physician in a hospital. If someone is cleaning bed pans and the Physicians says 'let me do that for you' it means one thing. If they say 'mind if I do that for you' it means another thing.
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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…
Presumably he also took over the employee's desk, computer, chair, telephone headset, photos of wife and children, and so on. "Mind if I..." would be a normal, polite thing to say in such a situation.