[deepGem]

I work closely with support teams and it's one of the toughest jobs in tech. I say toughest because it is stressful and the payoff for that stress isn't that high.

I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas.

IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve.

Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.

[pbourke]

> Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call

How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place.

How companies actually do this:

IVR>You can find self service options on our

Customer> 0

IVR> .. site to check your ...

Customer> 0

IVR> ... transfer funds and ...

Customer> 000000...

[deepGem]

Precisely. I get that a large portion of the population just wants to pick up the phone and call but that can be totally avoided with so many messaging outlets today.

On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard.

Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.

[selykg]

> Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way.

The fundamental problem is coders want to code. At least in my experience. Many are poor to terrible at talking to customers and have little desire to learn. If it isn't related to code they don't care. It's someone else's problem.

A few developers, the good ones I've worked with, know how to talk to customers and how to talk to support team members to help them.

I work in a support role now and I have worked in a development role in the past. I know both sides of it fairly well.

Finding good developers isn't trivial, but finding good developers that can communicate and work as a team, that's really hard.

[deepGem]

Agreed, I don't imply that developers should talk to customers but they should at least work with support team in a more cohesive manner.

I have seen the flip side also where the developers are very accessible, support pushes every minor issue over to engineering. This is like super rare though.

[michaelhoffman]

Microsoft at least used to send engineers over to answer support phone calls occasionally and it provided a level of insight into users they wouldn't get otherwise.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030816-00/?p=42...

Even Bill Gates did this:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15...

[piokoch]

Very true, there is a very good blog post by Joel Spolsky on that: a good support person will spot recurring technical and report that to devs. Some offshore "consultant" support or badly paid "call center person" does not give a crap about product quality; more, such support has no incentives to provide any meaningful feedback, as the more support incidents gets reported, the more money they earn.