The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I’m smoking crack. They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.
I really agree with this. It’s potentially an even bigger problem for digital agencies than it is for pure-play product companies - in an agency the developers are often so many layers of account service and client management away from the end customer that they can very easily lose touch with their users’ needs and problems.
The Way I Work: Paul English of Kayak (via soxiam, via superamit, via joshmohrer, via arigreenberg, via mikehudack)
reblogged from mikehudack
