I run a small tech startup, about 2M ARR. And at times we’ve been short staffed on support and I’ve sat in for support for a day or two. And every time I do this I discover loads of issues customers are complaining about that don’t seem to ever make it back to our engineering team. Perhaps it’s just our support reps, or the nature of support, but they seem to love to “solve” problems themselves rather than reporting it to engineering for a more permanent fix.

Always fun to see an exchange on Reddit like:

Person1: "thing doesn't work?"

Person2: "yeah it doesn't work for me either"

Person3: "it's always something I have to work around"

Person4: "I work for <company> as a customer support outreach social media community engagement executive. Can you go and jump through hoops and open a support case?"

Not raising it internally, not getting anything changed or fixed; suggesting the customer do more work to tell the company about the problem. A person who works for the company and is paid to read social media and has read the complaints, is not only apparently ignoring them but annoying the customers as well.

Alternate Person4: "<sigh> I work for <company> as a technical employee and we've been begging to get this fixed for years. As a workaround you can <xyz>. Email me directly if you need more help, and if we get a patch to fix ever, I'll let you know".

You can never rely on support reps to escalate UX issues to product teams for a couple reasons.

First, from their perspective if they are able to solve an issue by following their script, even if it took 20 convoluted steps, everything is working normally. People are used to occasionally dealing with workarounds so it's not a big deal in their mind.

Second, it's not in their interest to report UX issues. They are measured by the number of tickets they close, so the issue that gets a lot of inbound support and they know an easy workaround for is nicely boosting their numbers. Eventually these things get fixed by product and they move on to doing the same thing with other tickets.

At my last job I worked in professional services, and after reporting multiple issues over and over and over through the normal process I finally wormed my way into a friendship with engineering and product leadership. A conversation with someone they trust was THE ONLY WAY to get them to take seriously a Jira report from the field saying "this is annoying/broken at every customer. Yes there is a workaround, but can we get it fixed?"

Product at every company I've worked for only ever cared about prioritizing shiny new features or bugs that have people screaming at them.

speaking as someone who clawed their way up out of the support mud...

sometimes it's a lack of accessible escalation procedure (no, a bug report is not the same thing as "this feature sucks to use and needs to be revisited), and sometimes it's just the unfortunate fact that those support reps most capable of clearly explaining these issues (or better yet, understanding the underlying mechanisms that cause the issues) get promoted out of front-line support roles (hi)... or move on because they're not satisfied with remaining in support (hi).

obviously there are a ton of exceptions to this rule but i've personally covered just about all those bases throughout my career. i would have loved to have seen engineers get involved with the burden of support, but maybe that's just because i came out of dysfunctional shops... not that they're not all dysfunctional in one way or another.

I think a mix of both is best. If support can quickly solve a customer issue they should. But they also should make note of it and pass it along.

> don’t seem to ever make it back to our engineering team

Does support have a procedure for this or is it ever part of any training or meetings? Otherwise I hesitate not to call it a management issue, no offense.