Your programmers should be programming. It’s a lot cheaper to hire support or technical writing specialists to document things than put money producing programmers on trivial support tasks in my opinion.

Giving your lead developers access to monitor support issues seems like a more appropriate course of action. If they can query your support/ticket system to retreive common issues, then development can plan to address the most common support inquiries in an efficient non-whimsical manner.

GS

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It must be said that a programmer needs the right attitude to do this. There are “programmers” and “programmers” - not all like this kind of interaction. So before it is assumed that a new programmer will be able to support as well, make sure the personality profile is suitable.

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We recently got some full-time support staff who have so far been pretty good at handling the noise and passing on the real issues to us. Best of both worlds.

A related topic is that programmers should also be your operations people (if you’re running a service rather than selling shrinkwrapped software or devices). Anything that makes it difficult to debug or fix a problem gets cleared up in fairly short order.

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Similarly, if a feature is hard to use for users and we get a lot of questions about it, then we’re encouraged to write a tutorial. Since writing help is a lot harder than writing code, often the feature ends up being made easier so that less writing has to happen.

At the same time, I don’t think developers or systems people should have to do front-end support.

Firstly, they’re not trained for it or aren’t in the mode for it, and that means you’ll have customers who confuse their terseness/directness for a lack of respect or caring.

Secondly, those job types generally require focus time, and having to check on things constantly is going to break that. On the other hand, if they only check every hour, or only in the morning, then you won’t get the speedy response to support that your organisation wants to be famous for.

I’ve been astounded by how quick and helpful the support here at SynthaSite is, and like any other job, it’s about finding the right people. In previous companies, dealing with support had been a bit of a drag, but when your support people are as passionate about achieving their goals (ie, happy, useful, users) as I am about mine, then I have a lot of time for them, and will go the extra mile to make their lives easier and their goals closer.

(And, hey, if they can do the work, and enjoy doing the work, and it means I can focus on my work instead of support, then everyone enjoys themselves, and the users get both good support and good technology.)

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