| I've been building a distributed database product for more than 7 years, managing a team of nearly 300 R&D staff and serving hundreds of customers. Customer Support is hard for us. Not only the number of OnCalls, but also the complexity of the product causing that we can't solve the problem easily and fast. We are under a lot of pressure. To solve this, I have tried following ways: - Build an independent team (may name Escalation Engineering or L3 in other companies, here let's name L3) to focus on the customer problem solving. - Establish the OnCall duty mechanism, some engineers (maybe 10 one time) must join the L3 for two weeks only focusing on OnCall. Why it is so important, because I believe the quick way to learning our product is from OnCall. - Get to know our customers better. We are a database product, if we can know our customers' business workloads, we can give them more advices to let the business application run more better in our product. - Build many Diagnostic tool to solve the OnCall easily. Finally, I would like to say that although customer support is sometimes painful, it allows us to better understand our customers and know the strengths and weaknesses of our products. |