Ask HN: How to Survive in Customer Support? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to Survive in Customer Support?

6 pointsdata_ders5 comments

Those with experience in customer support, how to survive/thrive in customer support without burning out?

After a graduating a coding bootcamp, a friend took a role in customer support in the hope that they could use the experience to eventually transition to software development. However, now they feel burnt out and trapped by the "nature of the role" with its never-ending pile of tickets and goose-chasing in getting problems solved.

I've been solutioning with them to to try and find a way to make the work more bearable, but they are of the opinion that the problem is the job itself.

Context: they work at a <1000-person B2B marketing start up.

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I did various forms of tech support for 20+ years before deciding I wanted to move on.

It isn't for everyone for sure. Being tied to a desk and a phone can be hard...and if you are at the lower end of the spectrum you're going to get worse customers generally.

Also many support orgs have poor management and are seen / treated as inconvenient cost centers....

It is possible the job actually sucks.

For me I worked the issue and let the chips fall where they may.

If I was called away because of some silly issue and something else wasn't going to get fixed...so be it, that's just the way we were staffed. I didn't take sides or take it personally.

I worked hard and took pride in my work but didn't sweat it if the system was insane. I did advocate for improvements but didn't hold my breath.

I coped with drugs and alcohol before finally getting a job as a QA engineer an managed to escape. Tech support takes a thick skin and strong personality to not personally take home the never ending queue of angry customers, it’s generally thankless.

I don't have an answer, but I might have a path to an answer. There's a fantastic Slack community of customer support/success people and they're very supportive of newcomers: https://supportdriven.com/groups/

Many have worked through the same problem as your friend.

thanks for the resource, I'll pass it on.

If your friend wants to transition out of support, the only way to do that is to leave support. There is no nice path from tech support over to development, at least not in my experience.

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