About technical support

Note: This is a rant.

Support is important. Please. Keep this in mind. If you want to provide, or are already providing, a service to others, inside or outside your own organization, support is an important pillar of your product and your team.

Delivering new functionalities is great, funny, exciting. I get that, I also like to do that.

Fixing bugs is important, as it impacts the service stability and reliability, of course I agree with that too.

But support is also a very strong facet of your product. Do not neglect it, ever. Best postpone that new and cool functionality to a later release, and allocate time and effort for supporting your users.

If there is a support request, specially if you are running an infrastructure element, there is a chance that someone else is stuck on their own work-flow due to this. Not investing a few minutes on this request, or postponing it for days and days - when not plainly ignoring it - will make this person remain stuck, not able to deliver, and ultimately upset at you and your product to no end.

Ultimately, these users will abandon your service. If they can’t afford to, probably because they work inside the same organization, they may remain, but against their will. What is worse, if it’s not terrible hard to set up a parallel service, they will, because they won’t trust you. What’s the point of a central service then?

I get it, some just seem to complain for fun. But first, of these, some may just not have the same grasp of the product as you do. This is not an excuse to let them down. And for the small group of vocational complainers, well, you can send them to /dev/null but only when you have already acknowledged and at least tried to help them.

So, pretty please, allocate resources for support if you plan to “provide” a service, and definitely use them if needed.

I’ve seen already too many “services” without actual or proper support (??), and I’ve seen how their reputation suffers outside their close circle (even inside it). And this reputation harm tends to propagate even to those that do not deserve it.

As a final note, the reputation of your service ends being yours.

/end of rant