Love & Hate Relationship being a Technical Support
If you do your job right, you get no thanks. If you do your job wrong, you get shit.
As someone who was tasked to write plugins and extensions for various extensible platforms such as content management systems (CMS) or e-commerce platforms, I also serve as the technical support for such pieces of software primarily because I know it inside-out, more than anyone else in the team. Why I'm doing both development and support work is another story.
I initially hated support work because I'm not good talking with non-technical people. I don't have the patience to deal with people who don't know what they're doing. To top that, I have days when my social battery just runs dry and have no capacity dealing with other human beings in general. On such days, I am lazy; and I can be very grumpy at the same time if people try to insist that it's "our" fault that our software does not behave accordingly.
I can clearly remember one time when we initially launched a particular extension for an e-commerce platform, there were bugs that popped up in the first few weeks -- isolated cases that wasn't caught during testing. Nothing major, but annoying nevertheless. Since there had been learning curves for the platform, it being written in a language I have not touched for a long time for starters, it took some time to fix the bugs. It got so bad to the point that the CEO of a merchant we're trying to support that time got on call with me and my team and was demanding immediate rectification because her staff is having a hard time. While I did assure them that we will release a fix as soon as we can, she kept on talking about being frustrated because there's no concrete resolution to the issue. She was close to shouting when I intervened and said something along the lines of:
"With all due respect, you're asking for enterprise-level of support for something that you use for free. You're not even paying a single cent to use our software, particularly to profit from it. Kindly let us do our job so we can provide you with the support that you need."
Again, I was talking to the CEO of a client. Everyone was shocked. Imagine her angry response afterwards, something like:
"Is this how you do customer support?! We are your client! We're supposed to be prioritized!"
Fast-forward a few weeks after the incident, with most of the issues fixed and the client receiving hypercare -- their tech guy is one of the first to know about any updates a day before the eventual update release -- all's well that ends well. The CEO never contacted us again, but they are still using our software.
The extensions and plugins we developed are being used by hundreds of local clients at this point. At its current state, we can say it's stable enough that we barely need to support it. All we're getting from it at this point is praises for a job well done and random recognition from certain users.
Just today, a former client who asked for support sent me a message directly not asking for more support but to ask for advise on developing software. I was really baffled by it because we personally don't know each other and it's been months since he last reached out. His reason? He's planning to study a whole lot of new technologies to further develop his product, but according to him, he wanted to get an expert's opinion first so he would know which direction is best to take. While I was still feeling bizarre about it, plus the fact that I'm not sure I can be considered an expert so to say, I was more than happy to tell him about new technologies he can learn based on his use cases and requirements. He was really grateful about it, wished me good luck, and went on his way.
While I cannot fully claim that I like being a support, or being patient with people in general, it's incidents like today that keeps me pushing to be a better version of myself.