Is Support just completely disconnected from Engineering? Do they not have a way to report issues and indicate that many customers are having a specific issue?
Does the company believe that giving a customer a runaround will make them less upset than saying "Sorry, this is a known issue. We're working on it but do not have a timeline"?
Certainly at some point, some support person is going to be like "Huh, we have a lot of customers complaining about an issue, and our usual flowchart script doesn't seem to resolve it" and try to work it up the chain, right? Or does it get to their manager who says "Meh, that's an engineering problem, not a support problem. Get back to your tickets!" and never pass it up?
If you're working with a large company, Support is outsourced to a bunch of people reading scripts in Manila/Bangalore, and the external company employing them is actively incentivized to never resolve the root cause of any issue, because doing so would mean less tickets and less billable hours.
In my first job in a software maintenance project, I was overenthusiastic and was closing issues left and right. My manager called me to his office and told me that if I solved all the issues, the project will need much lesser people when they renew the contract, which might lead me, the junior most person, to be sent to the bench until they get a new contract.
Sounds like something that could be turned into an opportunity. Immediately start looking for a different job, and on the interview explain “I left previous job because I was too efficient at solving problems. After X time, there were no outstanding issues so I was no longer necessary. I’m looking for the next place where I can make a difference”. There are plenty of places that see fewer issues a positive.
To give you the other side of this, I have had service providers obviously do this to us. It didn’t result in more billable hours at renewal. We just systematically moved teams leadership to a competitor - we have found that mixing companies of origin in teams keeps everyone more honest - and removed developers we thought were not meeting the productivity standard we were looking for.
Cheating your customer is a dangerous game. They are not dumb.
It’s not that we were inefficient, we got some 80+ tools to support without any knowledge transfer or documentation. We got regular issues, and I was digging to find the root cause and solve them for which apparently we weren’t paid.
This is the usual response when a companies customer numbers start to scale up so far that the volume of users like the ones in Vegenoid's parent comment start to overwhelm the support staff. Keeping up the good/decent customer support that you could give to your first few hundred or perhaps even few thousand users eventually becomes ludicrously expensive or even impossible.
Then the original article's "Keeping this running and supported is shit. People are idiots and time wasters! Automate all the things!" stage kicks in.
So "first level support" is created, who's main objective is to get rid of support requests with the minimal effort by the least skilled staff possible. So everything is written into a script that call centre employees are required to follow. Low skill minimal wage staff are required to ask stupid things like "Have you tried reinstalling Windows?" and getting a confirmation that they have - before any support request is passed on to even a junior or intern developer. At this stage nobody gives a damn about users who need help, and they outsource that work to other users on the "community forums" and the entire support team is fired.
(Google, of course, being a world leader in both webtech and customer acquisition, completely skipped the "provide decent customer service" stage and went directly to the "don't give a damn about users" end game.)
Yes. Engineering time is expensive. Support exists to resolve problems without needing engineer time except when the company thinks that the problem is worthy of being addressed.
The tendency to wall off engineers is often taken to a counterproductive level.
Obviously, not every support ticket requires engineering attention. I would wager at least 90% don't. In the case of B2C businesses, likely 99.99% don't, considering 80% are customers that simply need a password reset and can't figure out how to do the most basic Reset Password -> Open E-mail -> Click link -> enter new password flow.
But there's a line SOMEWHERE. The few tickets that DO need engineering time REALLY NEED IT, and it's completely asinine that in some corporations, it's impossible.
If, for example, 100 people are talking to support for the exact same crash, and people in support are able to reproduce it, it needs to go to Engineering, rather than support telling customers "Have you tried formatting your drive and reinstalling everything from scratch?" when they already know it won't fix anything.
The best place I ever worked had fairly sophisticated, formal channels for noticing when a cluster of related-looking problems happened repeatedly, and escalating that to engineering for a fix. It also had open Slack channels with engineers and product managers in them, and some informal understandings about what type of problem was appropriate for support or professional services to bring up, there.
That combination kept the customer-frustrating bugs quite low, while still allowing engineering to keep developing new features at a fairly rapid pace.
(and then we got purchased by a PE firm and dismantled)
I think sometimes the company doesn't know what to do or doesn't care. But they have to make some response. So they just ask you to do a load of busywork, to keep you out of their hair for a while.
The other side of the coin is that support gets an ocean of lazy/unrelated/confused support requests that the engineer cannot help with, and responding and explaining that eats up a huge amount of time. I don't know that I agree with putting up barriers to reach support, but they are trying to address a real problem and I get where they are coming from
i remember we had similar issues at my 2nd to last job a bit ago. we would often times try to reduce the friction, but it built up and built up until, one day, there was zero chance of reaching anyone worthwhile. i wish we had gone back and really focused on providing as much support as we provide in product!!
sometimes we're aware of an issue and management has decided its not worth the effort to actually fix it, but also management doesn't want support to straight up tell people we wont help you, so they basically obfuscate
> Is Support just completely disconnected from Engineering?
Support is almost always tiered because $$$. In an ideal situation (hello GitLab!) tier 1 they are friendly and competent triage artists that can redirect lost customers and handle the common basic cases. Tier two is essentially an experienced and skilled tier 1. It's not until you get to tier 3 that you reach an engineer, usually one dedicated to support. That engineer is the one who reaches out to the operational engineering team if needed.
These flows are intended to dissuade problem reports, because the business is too big to care.
I once reported a ui bug to Discord(the game chat). This is how it went.
- me wrote an elaborate email and screenshots of the problem with step-by-step guide to reproduce it
- support responded me by asking build version, my os version, device type
- me screenshot all the requested details + manually wrote down in response email so someone can also copy-paste somewhere directly from my email
- support responds by asking me to clear my iphone cache(sending me a guide for Android's App data cleaning process) and see if issue persists
- me respond that it is not Android and since I knew what they will ask, I have uninstalled, reinstalled, logged-out, logged in and documented the whole process by recording my screen while doing it
- support, please try to logout, then uninstall and reinstall again
- me begrudingly do it again(record screen), send them everything
- support, could you try updating your device OS?
- me check for updates, iOS says it is latest, me send screenshots
- support, can you try disconnecting and reconnecting to your network or rebooting your device?
- me follow the steps(by recording my device using another device) and send it back
- support, can you try factory resetting your device
- me get pissed off, I mean c'mon, the issue is that, the client is incorrectly handling the on-screen keyboard events and has nothing to do with my device,
but giveup anyways and write on twitter that I tried to report an ui bug, is there some engineers I can reach out to?
- twitter official DM me and what do you know, it was the same person who was responding to my emails and tells me, if I tried resetting my device to factory default, else they'll close my ticket as not reproducible
I just gave up and uninstalled discord. I mean, sure there are lot of useless problem reports, but when your user goes on to extreme lengths to document an issue and cooperates, please take it seriously.
In most cases, the whole script is intended to deter the less patient consumers/users and not actually solve any problems. In some cases, the support is just an outsourced team with no connect/contact with actual team or the product.
As mentioned in another comment, support shouldn't be entirely disconnected.
If a customer seems to have discovered a legit bug in the software, there needs to be a path from support to engineering for the bug to get reported.
At the very least, support staff should be willing and able to attempt to recreate a bug that a user is reporting, rather than asking them to completely wipe their device and install everything from scratch for something that is easily reproduced.
Let's take a very simple example. Imagine you've got this Chess app, and whenever someone creates a checkmate involving two bishops, the game crashes, 100% of the time, but only in cases involving two bishops. Sure, maybe the first ticket you get, you go through the workflow of reinstalling, etc. But by the time you've got 100 tickets all saying their game crashed on a checkmate involving two bishops, that should have been escalated to engineering. At the very least, support should be saying it's a known issue. Honesty is going to be a lot less frustrating than to be told to take steps that both sides knows won't fix the issue.
Is Support just completely disconnected from Engineering? Do they not have a way to report issues and indicate that many customers are having a specific issue?
Does the company believe that giving a customer a runaround will make them less upset than saying "Sorry, this is a known issue. We're working on it but do not have a timeline"?
Certainly at some point, some support person is going to be like "Huh, we have a lot of customers complaining about an issue, and our usual flowchart script doesn't seem to resolve it" and try to work it up the chain, right? Or does it get to their manager who says "Meh, that's an engineering problem, not a support problem. Get back to your tickets!" and never pass it up?