The Costs of Running a Support Team in the Bay Area
peopledelight.com
peopledelight.com
Though having direct experience with this, these numbers are pretty good. Few places will need a dedicated VP/Director level for a 6 person team though, and if they did, that would apply to outsourced teams as well.
They also bear a lot more of the burden than a front-line support person, as the problems they solve are much more complicated, and need to fit in with competing interests beyond one customer's single support request.
I'm not sure about that part. The amount of abuse those people have to withstand without being allowed to defend themselves (because "it's a customer, be nice!") can break even the calmest person.
I kinda kid about the last part, but even when it's internal, being front-line support is brutal, especially for low-value products. The customer knows they can usually get free stuff by being mean, and it's the front line support rep who has to deal with that, almost always without the power to fire the customer. Half the time, they have to deal with corporate policies that are set in place really to get rid of customers who actually use support, but that don't want to admit this obvious fact. This requires an ungodly amount of patience.
That was one of the reasons why I think doing support for your own company is so much easier; you can actually say "Hey, uh, I don't think we can help you, how about I give you your money back and you go talk to a competitor?" you don't have to pretend to be ineffective until they leave on their own, which is essentially what the corporate policies are setup to do. It's soul crushing.
(I mean, developers get paid more because businesses notice when their developers can't develop; businesses seem to be largely okay with ineffective customer support. I suspect you would have to come within 70-80% of a developer salary if you actually wanted to keep effective customer support people. If you look at very high dollar products where support people are expected to actually help customers solve problems? they pay in that range; sometimes better. )
I think that's overly glorifying what engineers do and under appreciating support resources.
Most engineers that I know, highly talented or not, wouldn't last a week in a support org because they don't have the required soft skills.
And honestly, I think every engineer should spend more time talking to their support teams. It puts things in perspective when you realize that that bug you wrote or fix you delayed made someone's life a living hell when an irate customer kept badgering them about a fix.
My attitude at the time was to provide the support that would expect as a customer. This means that I understood the customer's problem, understood the product, and made an effort to solve the customer's problem. If the customer encountered a defect, I was honest about the defect and explained how to work around the problem.
I completely defend my statement, that, as an engineer, the problems that I solve are much more complicated then when I had to fill in while we were between support staff.
A support person's role is being an expert in the product supported; and clear communication. That is much easier than implementing a product where there are competing interests; and one customer may expect the product to behave in a way that contradicts what another customer expects; and contradicts what's in the business's best interests.
Furthermore, there is no formal eduction required for being a member of support staff; nor is there a requirement for the kind of accomplishment of skills. The appropriate analogy is nurse to doctor.
In my experience, support issues tended to involve legacy application technology and/or environment issues (usually antivirus given the nature of our product). Support for anything non-trivial involved WinDbg dumps or SQL dives in cooperation with development.
Did your support experience include working the issue back through development for a hotfix and retest until resolution?
Supply and demand! Software engineers are much harder
to find than support staff.
Nobody wants to think they're busting their ass to enrich someone who thinks they're better than you. That's not the kind of thinking that inspires people to work 10 hour days because they really feel dedicated to Twitter's world-changing mission! So our society has, in some ways, a sort of perpetual denial that class is there. People who want to be elected president have to be "someone you could have a beer with" and CEOs of billion-dollar companies have to let everyone call them by their first name.
If your company only employs engineers, and your cleaners mostly work at night, you can retain that impression pretty well. Everyone here is the same!
But the moment people notice there are support workers who don't get free snacks because they're lower on the status ladder, you can't really retain the impression that everyone is the same.
burden? i don't think so. I can code for hours but I am in awe of good support people. They have amazing skills at maneuvering situations. I would have glenfiddich in the coffee cup before 9am if I tried that role.
We've stayed on the peninsula and done our best to raise productivity (and thus comp) through training, retention, and technology. Wasn't easy but working well now.
I'm based out of a fairly cosmopolitan southern city, and I'd be hard pressed to construct a scenario where I could only find someone so unprofessional and conservative enough as to make a difference to the customer.
Maybe it's living in the south (where my social views tend to put me in the minority and hence used to dealing with ideological disagreements daily), but SF in particular seems pretty intolerant of the idea that lovely people might also happen to have different social opinions.
We've got 50+ people in the South (GA,SC,NC,FL), so I'm only calling it as I see it, not as I'm doing.
"All I want is someone who has the social skills to talk to clients, technical skills to be familiar with the stack, and the nous to troubleshoot issues based on the partial info that clients provide!"
Support sucks. You get the short end of the stick from everyone - clients, management, developers - and there's little in the way of benefits for doing so. No wonder there's a high turnover in the field.
For the most part, I've seen that the type of Orgs with those support wages are likely just trying to throw bodies at support volume. $16/hr for another human to answer X amount of tickets with a Y% satisfaction over Z amount of time. Their customer base is probably B2C or B2B with a large SMB base.
The model is bound to fail, particularly for communication reasons. The type of Org that employs this position is also likely to not have the product feedback loops that connect Support (reactive) with the Product/Eng teams (proactive...hopeuflly). This means product is not addressing bugs quickly or fixing usability issues that support agents frequently work around and explain to frustrated users. It also means they likely don't have adequate internal tooling to solve problems in real-time.
It's a form of technical debt that is REALLY hard to measure - I believe this is because there's too much focus on "standard" support metrics like NPS, FRT, # of touches... Yes these are important, but they are surface level stats for maintaining a basic, "good" support experience. Great support experiences require tighter integration with other teams with better data.
There's no one right answer, but likely a spectrum of options that need to be analyzed for which works best for you. - Have an international customer base? Maybe outsourcing could be a great option to keep costs low and cover more timezones - Not interested in outsourcing? Stay in the US and build a new office with talent outside the Bay Area (check out Lyft's Nashville office) - Do you absolutely need Support to be in HQ? Make the commitment to higher wages and staying lean and effective, not just as a Support team but as 1 company together.
If they don't want that, they can try to get one of the few, high-paying jobs in specialist work with almost no experience or take the risk of a move on whatever college or broke people have saved up. Most take the local job at least to start with.
There's a story that goes around the nonprofit sector about activists stopping sweatshops in developing nations. The wages there are terrible, the working conditions inhumane. So it's good that they stopped the sweat shops from existing. Right?
Well, they went and checked some time later, to measure the effects of the change. It turned out that the children who had been working at those inhumane sweatshops had turned to the next best alternative:
Child prostitution.
(Here's a link with sources to back this up: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hcp/seeking_reliable_evidence_claim_...)
It seems like your argument has the same structure. I don't know anything about People Delight, but if it's the case that this is the business model that makes it economically feasible to provide jobs to people for whom those jobs are the best option, then I think it would be a mistake to force those jobs out of existence because the jobs couldn't provide even more benefit to the workers than they currently do.
I want everyone, everywhere to have all they need and want, and to live happy lives on their own terms. It just seems like you're being unfair to fapi1974 by asking him to do it singlehandedly.
This isn't about forcing those jobs to go away. This is about keeping companies from exploiting these workers. The workers that People Delight are exploiting don't get the benefits tech firms bandy about so freely, can't unionize, don't get the opportunities to advance. There is money to be made there without exploiting, but things don't get better unless you criticize the people doing the exploiting.
I really see nothing wrong with hiring remote workers with compensation at a rate that's acceptable to them. It's not taking advantage of anything--they choose to live in small towns with a lower cost of living.
This is because support departments are viewed as cost centers, not profit centers.
People who work in cost centers generally get treated badly. If their manager can figure out how to lay them off without affecting customer retention, it's gonna happen.
One of my previous employers is a large telco, with two locations, one in Copenhagen and one in the other end of the country. When I left, the plan was to close down the entire support team in Copenhagen and move those tasks to the other office. The benefit was/is that you can pay people a little less, while still leaving them with a better work-life balance, due to lower rent and shorter commutes. As a bonus the "office" space is much cheaper.
There's a huge benefit to place things like support teams in more rural areas of a country. You'll have an easier time hiring and retaining and the cost goes down. Companies, especially in the English speaking countries, just take it one step to fare and move the job out of the country. Sure it's cheaper, but you'll lack the cultural understanding that your customers will expect. Also you do need developers, sales staff and so on to actually be on site with the support teams once in a while. Having to travel abroad or even more than a few hours really hinder that interaction.
Preface: I know some support rock stars and have nothing but respect for the amount of crap they have to put up with above and beyond software engineers, but from a salary perspective there are better things they could be doing. A lot of which, doing support for long will train them for. Yet those those are the exact people you want to keep in your support org.
But since we're talking about the Bay Area, and it sounds like specifically for a technically focused company (I'm thinking startup) the good news is that the core team is likely already fielding support because talking to customers is so important to the growth and direction of the product. Yes Bay Area salaries are high, but hopefully you're hiring high quality team members that are more than just front-line support -- they should be an invaluable part of your product and customer development process. You can't really put an outsourcing price tag on that.
Lots of companies have a process where the developers are insulated from day-to-day support roles -- and if that's working, great. But, the best companies have developers who want to talk directly to (or at least have support access to) customers and understand their problems first hand. This is where the high salaries more than pay for themselves.
I believe it's hard to have exceptional support by outsourcing it remotely (unless the whole company is remote). Especially in young company, when every week a lot of things is changing. Also developers can apply changes based on support insights.
Though this might make sense for established companies, I believe initially at startup you should almost never outsource support.
The business offices price and cost of living is lower, you can have a proficient team for 1/3 of the price.