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A comment on How I almost ignored our single best source for customer feedback.. Parent comment

Re:How I almost ignored our single best source for customer ... by smallblacksun on Thursday June 03, 2010 @09:58PM (#1403271)
The problem with that is that you are having engineers who cost the company $75+ an hour spending time doing the job that can be done by someone costing ~$30 an hour. Also, you run the risk of annoying your engineers.
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Re:How I almost ignored our single best source for customer ... by terpua on Thursday June 03, 2010 @10:18PM (#1403300)
It has to be part of your culture (ie when hiring). As for the cost, it pays back in understanding your customer better and getting engineers working on the right things.

I have been part of too many engineering teams working on the wrong things because of a lack of customer interface.

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Re:How I almost ignored our single best source for customer ... by markkanof on Thursday June 03, 2010 @11:17PM (#1403367)
As long as the developers really have the ability to make changes based on the support requests they are receiving.

I've been in the situation where each developer would take a day of the week handling support. But the support requests could be for any of the software built by the entire development team, not just the things that the individual developer worked on.

So then in many cases the developer was acting as an extremely expensive email/call filter. And the only lesson being learned was that some of the other developers weren't very good at their jobs.

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Re:How I almost ignored our single best source for customer ... by samaparicio on Friday June 04, 2010 @12:04AM (#1403451)
The cost of prioritizing the wrong things and ignoring what's important to your customers far outweighs the higher cost of engineers.

Also, consider that engineers can fix problems faster.

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Re:How I almost ignored our single best source for customer ... by studer on Friday June 04, 2010 @06:42AM (#1403962)
Except that "what's important to your customers" isn't necessarily "what's important to the last caller, or the angriest one". That model doesn't really scale beyond a certain number of customers...
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