Dave Martin

Heya! I’m Dave. I’m a product designer, engineer, PM, and team lead who works at Automattic.

Startups, what if you never hired dedicated support people?

I’m curious, are there any web companies – with 10 or more employees – that do not have at least one dedicated support person?

Hiring a dedicated support team is one of those things that every company seems to do without thinking about it, as if it were a requirement. But what if you didn’t? What if the founders, designers, and developers in your company continued to support your users indefinitely?

It would likely seem unnatural at first. The founders would have to lead by example. Else, I’m positive it would not work.

But I’m curious, with direct daily feedback from actual users:

would the designers design better products?
would the founders stay more in tune with users, thus prioritizing feature development more effectively?
would developers be more motivated to find creative ways for users to resolve their own problems?
would designers & developers instinctively fix more bugs?
would the overall product and user experience be better as a result?
would it be sustainable & scalable?

NOTE: I’m not trying to diss anyone in dedicated customer support roles. To the contrary, many of you are some of the hardest working, untiringly empathetic, and all around coolest people I’ve had the pleasure of working with (Both at Automattic, and Campaign Monitor).

My big hypothesis here is that by forcing founders, designers and developers to share the support load, and not pawn it all off on someone else, chances are:

founders and designers would have a much clearer vision of what they should be building throughout the life of the business.
your product would be better, because designers and devs would experience the pain users go through, and fix more things along the way.
your customers would get answers to their questions faster, because your developers – seeking to automate repetitive tasks – would invest more time in solutions for users to solve their own problems. Thus reducing the support load by reducing the number of support tickets that get created in the first place.

I’m mostly just curious if this has ever been tried.

4 responses to “Startups, what if you never hired dedicated support people?”

MK

July 12, 2014

Interesting. I’m a big fan of the support rotations that devs and designers participate in at Automattic, especially the two weeks of support every new Automattician handles. Always better to engage users for designing products that meet their needs.

However, compartmentalizing support with a dedicated team does let your devs and designers focus on code by reducing mental switching cost throughout the day. I’m not saying it’s perfect – it’s entirely possible that division of labor is antiquated – nevertheless, there’s something to be said maintaining focus and efficiency.

80/20 would be an interesting experiment.

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Joseph Scott

July 12, 2014

On both the VaultPress and Akismet teams I was ( and still am ) regularly in support. I like knowing at least a little bit of what is going on first hand, even if it just small portion of the total support tickets.

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Ben Dwyer

July 12, 2014

At one of my previous companies, which was a small startup, the founders handles support until the company grew to about 20 people. I think the reason they didn’t let anyone else handle it is because it’s so important to do it right.

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Elizabeth

July 15, 2014

One thing to consider is that the vast majority of good support isn’t bug-hunting and reporting. It’s explaining simple concepts over and over again (things like browser issues, internet connection problems, etc., that don’t necessarily have to do with your product) while being not merely polite, but genuinely welcoming and conversational. It’s taking the time when a confused user asks you a question about a service that isn’t yours to sign up for that service and find the answer anyway, because you know from experience they won’t get enough individualized support from them. It’s figuring out what someone means when they say something like, ‘I want business buttons atop.’

Were devs and designers to truly do this to the full extent a support team does, they would have no time to develop and design. I do think dipping into support regularly to get a good first-hand view of how things are going is a great idea, though, and then you can focus on the questions that actually relate to what you’re working on.

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