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Comment by nostrebored | Hacker News Reader

This is one of my favorite things about Amazon's support system. Support has direct access to PMs, developers, customer facing solutions architects and all of these orgs have close connections to the customers as a result. While not everyone has access to the support cases, customer sentiment is conveyed as part of this process and features or bug fixes are quickly roadmapped as a result of customer pain.

The fact that there's someone at the other end of the support channel who actively cares and understands the problem and the customer's voice is being conveyed company wide creates a better experience for everyone.

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I have reported and watched maybe half a dozen bugs get fixed on Amazon, starting in 2003 I think. Never even experienced a reply from any other company when trying to report problems over the years.

I think a handful of companies are getting more proactive with security reporting, but everyone still treats the quality of their services and front line support system as an afterthought.

The customers are testers, especially in "break early, break often" scenarios. I wouldn't call them testers to their face, but... operationally, they're part of the loop. Treat them as such. If you're not going to pay for much testing up front, at least treat the real testers (customers/endusers) as part of a process, not as part of a problem.

If, when I reported an issue, and it was determined not to be PEBKAC... loop me in on updates, or followup with questions. I'm happy to try to reproduce issues, or give more details, or whatnot. I'm a user/customer - I want the product/service, and I want it to be better.

Yeah, it's honestly disheartening, but it's great seeing Amazon realize the value that support can play. Even looking at the hiring requirements for some of the positions can give you some insight into why it works as well -- support teams which require it have strict development requirements, and consequently the support engineers 1) know the problem space and can infer what you're trying to do 2) know what it feels like to be blocked by something completely out of your control and feel like you're writing into the aether

It would be great for companies as a whole to start realizing the value that you can bring to your existing customers through this experience, and to recognize that this is another face of your company.

> This is one of my favorite things about Amazon's support system. Support has direct access to PMs, developers, customer facing solutions architects and all of these orgs have close connections to the customers as a result.

This only works if they know how to convey the relevant issues to the right developers properly.

I had some large files on my Amazon Drive (the consumer product) which could never be downloaded via the desktop app, web browser, odrive, or rclone. I had to endure multiple instances of support going through the flowchart, and some promises of conveying my issue to the engineering team only to be met with disappointment.

I never managed to recover those files in the end.

> This only works if they know how to convey the relevant issues to the right developers properly.

100% this. I don't know that it was like this across the company, but the way customer-facing issues were escalated to my group was pretty awful and almost always mishandled. Customer tickets landing in the same queues as host/service auto-generated tickets, bad handoffs and prioritization, devs with no support experience asking for way too much information from non-technical people just trying to use the service. I suppose the first-line support org is to blame in part. Though it wasn't one of the hotter products they offer, it was definitely old enough and nearly foundational to have warranted several more subject matter experts on the support side. Seeing them tout themselves as one of the most customer-centric companies out there was flabbergasting when it came to that org.

(Source, used to eat bananas)

I had to look up what your "used to eat bananas" reference meant: https://nypost.com/2017/05/23/amazon-gave-away-too-many-free...

Interesting story!

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