Engineers joining usability tests is a great thing. Engineers talking with PMs and joining early discovery is a great thing.
But I would quit immediately if I were put on a customer support rotation. This seems idiotic.
Why?
I sort of thought similarly about a decade ago, until I actually was on the end of a giant on-call tree almost permanently for 3 years. I wasn't the first person they'd call and not even the second, third or fourth. But eventually someone would call me and ask me to jump in & dig through it - I loved it, because eventually that's just a neat puzzle with an angry customer attached (if I could walk in someone else's shoes for a week, it would be rachelbythebay's).
I also did primary on-call out of solidarity with the team. And 1 week out of every 20-odd wasn't hurting me as much as I thought it would, but the customer contact gave me enough weapons to argue with the PM teams when it came to "customers want 'faster horses', stop working on cars" arguments.
I could actually see the product used and talk to the people who are struggling with it, better than the stage-managed customer advisory board they setup for each year's sales kick-off.
Of course, there's a vastly different "competency rearrangement" disease which you might be referring to, which is spread through out the article.
If engineering is good at doing things, they get things to do that have nothing to do with engineering - QE is slow, get engineering to fix QE process, product has bugs in prod at a customer, get an engineer to fix it reactively, customer conversations aren't closing fast enough, get a credible engineer to talk to their engineers, if product can't figure out what to build in what order, get an engineer into that conversation.
Eventually, engineering is doing a lot of things half-competently and the company chugs along, dragging the other people who aren't failing hard enough to get fired because the engineers stop every buck passed to them.
I'm more than happy to receive a request like "something weird happened with this user's account, can you look into the data/logs?", but not, "Hi, I can't log into my account, what should I do?". That is the customer support I got the impression of from the article
We weren’t allowed to touch the “I can’t access my account” tickets because that usually involves some kind of identification process where getting it wrong could result in huge legal liabilities. But all the other stuff… bugs, people just confused on some process, or whatever. Those were fun.
I also make this very clear to my boss. "If you want someone on customer support, you want someone else instead of me."
It's really important to know how disconnected you are from customers. On every single occasion at every organisation I have worked for I have discovered great disparity between the user's desires and problems and what is communicated through the layers.
Layering communication is dangerous!
Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change.
Basically, rotating 3rd level support along with an alert/on-call duty I'm totally fine with. First-level, I'm not.
This is a quality problem of the people doing the communicating. We need those people to do better, not drop engineers to get the real story
>Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change.
This is true, but the engineer doesn't (shouldn't?) have to be the face of that. Once you allow customers to escalate directly with engineers, they'll see the rest of your support process as bullshit.
This is what made me customer obsessed and to this day I will meet with the support team at any new company I work with to understand the plight of the customer