This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person.

I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to do so. Almost all of my customers speak to me in a rude tone.

I have no incentive to pretend to have an interest in their issues. I don’t think the issue is with customer support, but general attitudes among IT professionals.

On top of this, customer success is treated as a second class to engineering even if our problems are harder and more stressful. Imagine finding a bug and being blamed for the bug not being fixed while at the same time engineering is mad at you for wanting it fixed. Gross.

Anyway- support; never again.

I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas.

IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve.

Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.

How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place.

How companies actually do this:

IVR>You can find self service options on our

Customer> 0

IVR> .. site to check your ...

Customer> 0

IVR> ... transfer funds and ...

Customer> 000000...

On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard.

Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.

The fundamental problem is coders want to code. At least in my experience. Many are poor to terrible at talking to customers and have little desire to learn. If it isn't related to code they don't care. It's someone else's problem.

A few developers, the good ones I've worked with, know how to talk to customers and how to talk to support team members to help them.

I work in a support role now and I have worked in a development role in the past. I know both sides of it fairly well.

Finding good developers isn't trivial, but finding good developers that can communicate and work as a team, that's really hard.

I have seen the flip side also where the developers are very accessible, support pushes every minor issue over to engineering. This is like super rare though.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030816-00/?p=42...

Even Bill Gates did this:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15...

This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse.

I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense) identify the issue and report the bug, respond to the customer with a well-written apology, confirming that they were correct and a bug tracker id to follow.

Customer was very pleased they were finally escalated to the adult in the room ;)

The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are:

- logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you.

- "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket

...you feel powerless.

Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..."

Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.

I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...

I wonder if companies are relying on your empathy. They want you to realize this and just close tickets before they're resolved. Like the service desk's primary directive is to get customers off their employer's backs. If they happen to fix an issue along the way, that's a nice bonus.

For example, I've had to call Amazon 4 times recently over the same issue. I've been lied to each time that they fixed it. I was promised evidence that I was never given. I really don't know what to do about this...

In more polite terms, "Try to escalate the ticket by 15 minutes if you haven't resolved the issue."

- limited decision power. Many times even though you genuinely want to help customor you can't because of it.

- have to cover up others' lies like sales people etc

But still, I would recommend having support experience (atleast a month)to developers. It will change your attitude to solve problem. What really matters to customer is not fancy tech-stack or shiny interface but working service.

I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)

As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared.

Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year".

The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too.

FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.

Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that).

A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane

Reader, working in customer care blows. It sucks hardcore. From my engineering work, I actually knew what the cause of the problems were and understood the timeline for fixing them -- information that real customer care reps rarely have available to them, but even that wasn't enough to appease some people. Even when people weren't rude, just the never-ending barrage of complaints and problems that I had to fix wore me down. And I only worked one shift, and then went back to engineering the next day.

People who can do this day after day, retain their composure, and somehow not burn out from the nature of the work are awesome, and they have my respect. Their jobs are absolutely more difficult than mine.

I worked on a SaaS product that was essentially a booking engine. Vacations, rentals, tours, b&bs; etc. Their product was complete shit and it was so stressful to work on. Nearly a decade of terrible choices and the wrong technologies stacked up like a card house.

The only thing that kept the customers there was the insanely talented and competent customer service. They knew the app inside and out and were able to smooth out the insane number of rough edges for new and old customers alike. When gifts were sent to the company, they were typically sent to customer service.

Everyone in CS was paid terribly. It really bothered me. The software team was doing a Bad Job and getting paid well for it, and CS was really saving everyone’s asses. Since then I look at the customer support team a lot differently.

I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else.

I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls.

Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing.

I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.

As a consequence, I eventually gave in and decided to improve my numbers to see how "well" i could do. I was able to cut down my times to about a third of a normal agent, but that also resulted in me being more robotic and much less of a human to the customers.

This is what caused service reps to waste everyone's time with elaborate fake displays of empathy and forced unwanted small talk. I'd prefer an efficient robot.