tangentalizingly delicious

Friday March 10, 2006

Supporting customers can be hard fucking work. The rest of this post is probably at least that unoriginal. At Rob’s Dream Company (a notional corporation), Customer Support Representatives, which I dream of actually being Customer Advocates, need to have actual influence and power to change something that is negatively impacting customers.

Too often, CSR types have their hands tied. They’re not there to actually help customers, they’re there to keep customers away from the developers, or to deflect criticism, or to offer some freebies or discounts in return for continued poor service.

The way around this in a small company is to have the makers of the product actually support it, and I guess more importantly, to have people that care about what people think of their product. Or to make a product that is worth caring about.

At one of the companies I used to work for, there was a situation for all of our products where if the users didn’t read the manual and notice the prerequisites section, a predictable error would be raised because one or more of the prerequisites would not be installed, so when they were referenced they would not be found, thus “Boop: Component cannot be found.”

Rather than trap the error, or even better detect the presence of the components on startup, the developers chose to add the afore-hinted-at prerequisites section of the documentation. For the entire length of time I worked there, every week or two someone would call or email and say “I got this error message” and the support department would explain that the error indicated that these components would be installed. The customer would install them, and everything would progress smoothly.

Which is, frankly, a bullshit process that infuriated me every time it was raised, but my hands were tied and there was shit-all I could do about it.

Customer Advocates need to have the power to see situations like that and say “Wait just one fucking second. Every week those of is that interact directly with customers have to waste a minimum of 10 minutes explaining this to them?”

Although in reality, in a good development shop that sort of situation should never arise, and during my first week when I was told about that error, because I was (“Oh, and keep an eye out for this error, it always means this” “always?” “yes, always”), I should have ran away screaming. The shit I’ll put up with for a steady paycheque.