Last week for a week I was working as a technical coordinator in our client support. Basically in this post I’d like to share this experience.
How did I setup it? I chose client support team, got access rights to our tickets management system, moved to sit with my new temporary team (which is awesome by the way) and started taking incoming unassigned tickets trying to resolve those and help our clients to use our system in the best way possible.
Some points why I find it useful
First of all I think it’s good for personal development. Usually people tend to create a comfort zone around them. In my opinion the bigger comfort zone we have the lazier and less effective we became. I try to step out my comfort zone from time to time: this time in a form of internship in client support.
The most useful take-away out of this experiment for me was that I learned the real workflow how we start and setup integrations with publishers: what steps it includes, how long does it take to do those steps, what lasts longest, what needs to be improved.
And one thing that client support team got from this internship, during that week I created scripts to speed up some particular tasks and avoid lots of manual work (to accomplish these tasks manually they were spending approx. 5 hours and with the script - it takes up to 10 min).
In addition to these take-aways, I made new friends and I worked in another position.
Biggest challenges
Not everything went smoothly in the beginning. First it was very hard to stop doing my primary in background. Then for a couple of days it was hard to resist not to ask my teams for a help resolving issues. But the most challenging were situations that involved lots and lots of working with UI on repeating actions. Knowing database structure and having all accesses to run queries on database it was very hard for me not to write query, but to do all the work as client support guys do it - via UI. To feel for real what are the most repeatable actions, and how important is UX.
Repeat it
Overall I’m happy I did it! I will definitely do it next time, maybe in another client support team. I even will try to encourage guys from development to take similar internships - to use for real the product we develop.
I think if every developer had a chance to use the product he developed, some priorities would change.
That’s why I think that everyone in a company should work at least for a week in a year in client support.