Everyone should read support emails • Hacker News Board

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#161

Post by bostonvaulter2 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #141

jwr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is excellent advice. I will add to it: If in a small company you are spending a certain percentage of time/money/effort on support (probably 10-15%), there is no reason for that percentage to be different in a large company. Go through that again with me, please. You've been spending 10-15% of your time listening to customers and providing good service. When you grow, why would you want to provide worse service?…

An organization with 5 customers can babysit each one to make sure they’re happy in 10-15% of their time. An organization with 1000 customers couldn’t do that even with 100% of their time. The only way to maintain a fixed allocation of customer support funding is to make it less high-touch as you grow.

That highly depends on how much money you're getting from each customer

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#162

Post by a1369209993 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #141

jwr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is excellent advice. I will add to it: If in a small company you are spending a certain percentage of time/money/effort on support (probably 10-15%), there is no reason for that percentage to be different in a large company. Go through that again with me, please. You've been spending 10-15% of your time listening to customers and providing good service. When you grow, why would you want to provide worse service?…

An organization with 5 customers can babysit each one to make sure they’re happy in 10-15% of their time. An organization with 1000 customers couldn’t do that even with 100% of their time. The only way to maintain a fixed allocation of customer support funding is to make it less high-touch as you grow.

If you have 200 times as much revenue, why don't you have 200 times as many employee-hours?

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#163

Post by blaze33 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:26 PM UTC

Actual reports from actual users are priceless to build what provides value actually worth paying for.

I've met devs considering good code and well engineered systems as their ultimate work goals. While myself, only ever saw software as tools towards any actual value keeping the business afloat.

Does that make me a weird software engineer? Or one that should look for some better suited role? Still wondering...

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#164

Post by PeterisP » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #160

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An organization with 5 customers can babysit each one to make sure they’re happy in 10-15% of their time. An organization with 1000 customers couldn’t do that even with 100% of their time. The only way to maintain a fixed allocation of customer support funding is to make it less high-touch as you grow.

I respectfully disagree. Note that 10-15% of resources of a 5-customer organization is very different from 10-15% of resources of a 1000-customer organization, assuming your customers actually pay you money (generally recommended). This means that even assuming you get no benefits of scale (and you should be, your software/product should improve as you learn and support load should fall), there is no reason why you c…

This is all about scaling. You want to do 10x the customers with 2x the employees, so that the business finally starts to make money. The service level that took 10-15% of your resources back then would take the majority of your resources now; the same % of your resources now is much less hours per customer.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#165

Post by kempbellt » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

gist wrote: post #120

michaelt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not the employee's desk. It is Microsoft's desk (and Bill is defacto Microsoft) He wasn't in the employee's house. He is using the desk that Microsoft provided for him. He is not 'another guy doing tech support asking to sit in and do a job'.

Unless it is a part of the company culture you signed on for, relationships between employees and employers are never black and white, "We bought this desk and phone, so we reserve the right to come over and just snag it out of your hands whenever we want"

Basic human decency always enters the equation

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#166

Post by mey » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:36 PM UTC

blaze33 wrote: post #163

Actual reports from actual users are priceless to build what provides value actually worth paying for. I've met devs considering good code and well engineered systems as their ultimate work goals. While myself, only ever saw software as tools towards any actual value keeping the business afloat. Does that make me a weird software engineer? Or one that should look for some better suited role? Still wondering...

It doesn't make you weird, but unfortunately may put you in the minority of developers. There is a balance to be struck. Business can drive really bad technical decisions (debt) due to time/people constraints that take decades to remove. This may be needed simply to get the company going or stay going (see most startup MVPs). Those decisions need to be intentional and strategic, otherwise it becomes the norm, and your entire company gets bogged down in supporting "legacy" systems. On the other extreme, a "perfect" solution can never be delivered so it's kind of hard to sell.

My anecdotal experience is that these trade offs are rarely consciously made, instead made by who ever has political power at the time.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#167

Post by MaulingMonkey » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

gist wrote: post #120

michaelt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not the employee's desk. It is Microsoft's desk (and Bill is defacto Microsoft) He wasn't in the employee's house. He is using the desk that Microsoft provided for him. He is not 'another guy doing tech support asking to sit in and do a job'.

I'm going to be annoyed if a coworker swipes company gear I need to do my job effectively, or gets a headset I'm using all sweaty. And my desk certainly has personal effects which do not belong to the company - which could be anything from family pictures to keyboards to extra monitors.

Maybe there's no reason for the employee to object or get offended, but that also means there's no harm in asking permission since the answer will be yes. And there's harm in not asking permission, even though the answer will be yes. You have a couple of choices:

You can treat your employees like peers to get along with and respect. Even if it's more optical illusion than reality, this can make for happier - and thus more productive - employees.

You can treat your employees like minions to boss around. Not exactly the most motivating of environments for your employees. They could try and make their unappreciative boss a little happier... or they could browse facebook a bit more. And maybe steal a few pens to stick it to the man. Maybe not a big deal for a once-off interaction, but even that sets an example for your managers and their not so once-off interactions with their "minions"...

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#168

Post by nacs » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #164

jwr wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. Note that 10-15% of resources of a 5-customer organization is very different from 10-15% of resources of a 1000-customer organization, assuming your customers actually pay you money (generally recommended). This means that even assuming you get no benefits of scale (and you should be, your software/product should improve as you learn and support load should fall), there is no reason why you c…

This is all about scaling. You want to do 10x the customers with 2x the employees, so that the business finally starts to make money. The service level that took 10-15% of your resources back then would take the majority of your resources now; the same % of your resources now is much less hours per customer.

There shouldn't be a linear increase in support requests with a larger customer base.

As your product scales to more customers, the percentage of support requests generated should be going down as you improve your product and support documentation based on existing customer support requests.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#169

Post by AznHisoka » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #104

AznHisoka wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

"My work's support people are very efficient, so we were processing tons of tickets and bogging down their infra"

That kind of says it all... There should be no reason support tickets should bog down their infrastructure. We're not talking about millions of real-time transactions here, even in the most popular consumer products. I should expect perfection because it's simply the most trivial product you can build, technology-wise.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#170

Post by bonestamp2 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

We have a policy that if a bug generates more than 20 support calls in a day, the developer who introduced the bug has to spend the next day in the call center answering support calls. It's not designed as a punishment. It's designed as an eye opener to the effect it has when we don't write proper tests or don't take proper care in making changes.