<story><title>Engineers should do customer support and success</title><url>https://notoriousplg.substack.com/p/nplg-102022-engineering-customer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>Every engineering-minded founder&amp;#x2F;CEO will come up with this idea once in their career, get badly burned, and quickly realize why roles like customer success exist.&lt;p&gt;Having developers answer support tickets and follow up on leads is a terrible use of their time (especially considering how much you are paying them) and they will be terrible at it. In the worst case they will piss off customers and actually harm your business.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if the situation was flipped, and your CEO went &amp;quot;sales reps need to understand engineering complexity, so from now on they will each have to fix 10 bugs a month.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If there are problems with bug &amp;amp; feature prioritization, customer satisfaction or the product feedback loop, focus on fixing them the right way (and involving the right roles) instead of taking shortcuts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Beltalowda</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve done plenty of direct customer support as an engineer, and I think everyone won because of it.&lt;p&gt;This was usually on some more difficult issues, or issues that involved an actual bug. Why bother going through a support person if I can just talk to the customer myself and explain the issue better, or ask the right questions straight away? Seems to me that&amp;#x27;s not a waste of time, but a time &lt;i&gt;saver&lt;/i&gt; for everyone.&lt;p&gt;Same with feature requests; a support person can fob a person off with &amp;quot;thank you for your feedback&amp;quot; and create an internal issue with no context, or I can talk to the customer myself, get a good idea of what problems they&amp;#x27;re running in to, and discus with them how to best fix it. Sometimes these are almost trivial fixes or changes, but a support person doesn&amp;#x27;t always realize that. In general keeping an eye on the support inbox gives me a better idea of how customers are using our service and what kind of things they&amp;#x27;re running in to.&lt;p&gt;The amount of time&amp;#x2F;money spent on this is minimal, if it even exists at all, especially considering this is the sort of thing you can do a bit later in the day when you&amp;#x27;re not producing the sharpest code in the first place (I usually don&amp;#x27;t anyway). Even as a mostly backend engineer I&amp;#x27;ve gotten a lot of value out of it, and I think our customers and the business overall have as well.&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;i&gt;forcing&lt;/i&gt; developers who don&amp;#x27;t want to do this is probably a bad idea: they will do a shoddy half-job, be unhappy, and no one wins.</text></comment>
<story><title>Engineers should do customer support and success</title><url>https://notoriousplg.substack.com/p/nplg-102022-engineering-customer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>Every engineering-minded founder&amp;#x2F;CEO will come up with this idea once in their career, get badly burned, and quickly realize why roles like customer success exist.&lt;p&gt;Having developers answer support tickets and follow up on leads is a terrible use of their time (especially considering how much you are paying them) and they will be terrible at it. In the worst case they will piss off customers and actually harm your business.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if the situation was flipped, and your CEO went &amp;quot;sales reps need to understand engineering complexity, so from now on they will each have to fix 10 bugs a month.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If there are problems with bug &amp;amp; feature prioritization, customer satisfaction or the product feedback loop, focus on fixing them the right way (and involving the right roles) instead of taking shortcuts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trap_goes_hot</author><text>&amp;quot;One test is worth a thousand opinions&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I worked at a SMB where everyone in the company had to perform some customer facing duties every month. No, we weren&amp;#x27;t terrible at it, and it helped all of us gain an appreciation of a different point of view. No customer was pissed off (in fact some were impressed when they realized they were talking to senior management), and while the company is no longer in business (for various other reasons) there was no noticeable harm caused by this.</text></comment>