I didn’t say that you should have zero customer support, but I don’t think the level system is the problem. It’s a problem when the levels don’t properly escalate stuff they don’t understand. But you just can’t have every support case go directly to the developers because 90% of support cases are stuff developers can’t help you with.
It’s like saying every person in a hospital should directly go to the operating theater.
The 10% people needing urgent care would like it but it’s a very inefficient way to use the time of the staff. That’s why you have a reception (Level 1) that’s triaging cases and checking if you even need a doctor.
> It’s a problem when the levels don’t properly escalate stuff they don’t understand.
This is the real human psychology trap. By definition, L1 doesn't understand anything it can't handle.
Unfortunately, at many companies L1 is also yelled at for escalating too many cases.
Consequently, the internalized message for L1 to not get yelled at is "Juggle the ticket you don't understand convincingly, until the customer abandons interaction from frustration."
A few anti-patterns I've seen in most support shops:
1) Bad KPIs / no post-hoc sampling and review. Without regular, random, higher-level sampling and classification of how tickets were handled, there's no signal that support is technically botching a large % of incoming tickets.
2) Disincentives to escalation, even when it's a true positive escalation that should be. IMHO, support should be incentivized to escalate true positives.
3) Failure to upskill support agents and build mix-of-expertise within the support function.
4) To 3, failure to pay support for the value they're creating. In a sane world, a few of your highest skilled support people will be paid like developers, because they are.
The exception being that the triage is a queue-based system, and eventually it actually handles your case: you show up at the hospital, describe your problem to a human being, and you're assigned a priority in the queue pertaining to the specialist that needs to see you.
If you're not dying you might have to wait a few hours, but you can rest assured that you will be looked at by an expert -- even if you're a hypochondriac.
If your case is an emergency, you can cut through all the queues and go straight to the operating table.
Whereas most L1 support systems are either non-existent; a FAQ loop that gets you nowhere; or a Dialogflow/GPT chatbot with 0 reasoning skills, no technical knowledge, and limited domain knowledge (really just a more convoluted version of the FAQ loop).
If you're lucky, after some digging you might find a hidden link that lets you talk with a real human being.
These systems are deliberately set up to massively increase the effort required to get to talk to a technician, as those are a limited resource and companies don't want to spend money on stuff that would actually improve their internal processes.
And if hospitals worked like this then the majority of people showing up for any problem whatsoever would die before receiving care. This is not how triaging works.
Still a tiered support system: last year I started a side project and I wanted to advertise on Google. Created the AdWords account, with all the legal documentation and everything, it got banned in two days. All the support I could reach was bots. Luckily I had some friends at Google who could escalate internally....
I bet they still have a level system for the advertiser support, there’s no way an actual developer reads the first message. Maybe for very large customers they have a dedicated support line, but not for a small business advertising on google.
One thing is customer support and the other is user support. There is few to none of the latter.
Regarding the former, my company pays for google workspace and an agent happily answered our questions about the recent less secure apps password phasing out process.
It’s like saying every person in a hospital should directly go to the operating theater. The 10% people needing urgent care would like it but it’s a very inefficient way to use the time of the staff. That’s why you have a reception (Level 1) that’s triaging cases and checking if you even need a doctor.