Your first support hire
Choose wisely
Today I’m talking to the founders, though these principles apply to anyone who’s got to make the decision whether or not to start hiring support engineers. You’ve spent your time figuring out a great product, building it with your first engineering hire, and you’ve signed your first paying customers. Congratulations! But with customers come customer problems, and right now their only point of contact is you. Before you realize it, you’re spending hours every day reading and responding to customer emails, and for at least half of those issues you need to loop in your engineer. You’re not spending your time selling your product and growing the business, your engineer isn’t spending her time building the product, and you’re both getting frustrated. Maybe it’s time to bring someone on board to handle these issues.
And beyond the very specific case of addressing customer technical issues, think a bit more about what a customer-facing technical resource will bring to your organization. Presales technical assistance. Post-sales setup and integration. Even professional services, if your product is complex enough to support (or require) heavy customization and deployment assistance. Your first support hire is going to have to do all of these things—and if you think you can bypass this by hiring an SE or a TAM first, guess what? They’ll be doing support too. So you need to think about all of these job functions when hiring.
Here are some signs that it’s time to hire a support engineer or three.
You or your first engineer are spending more than X% of your time answering customer emails. What X is for you will vary, but often it’s as low as 10%. That ten percent could be put to more effective use improving your product and gaining new customers!
Your customer onboarding process is anything more complicated than ‘download and run’. With any level of complexity your customers will start to have issues, and beyond that, it’s time to start thinking about a formal technical onboarding process. Who’ll handle this? It’s too technical for you and not a good use of your software engineer’s time.
In sales situations you, or your first sales hire if you have one, are starting to get questions you can’t easily answer. A technical customer-facing resource would really be helpful, but your sales process isn’t nearly mature enough to start thinking about a sales engineering function. Who can help? You guessed it.
So you’ve decided to take the plunge and hire someone. What should you be looking for? That’s an (upcoming) article in itself, but here are a few initial thoughts. The top line is that you need to hire someone who can hit the ground running with minimal ramp-up. You’re hiring because you need to, and you don’t have the luxury of a long training period.
Look for someone who is familiar with your customer profile and skillsets already. Maybe it’s someone who actually is one of your early customers, though obviously that kind of poaching needs to be approached very carefully.
Your hire is not only going to have to provide support to your customers starting on day one, but set the stage for future growth. Hence you want someone who has some level of leadership experience already, or at the very least an affirmative interest in team building. You don’t want to hire someone who’s great at handling support issues but falls down as soon as the role shifts to building in addition to providing direct customer support.
Maybe it goes without saying, but you want someone who’s actually comfortable interacting with customers directly and regularly. This person has customer-facing experience, maybe in support, customer success, sales, or even consulting.
Above all, you need someone who actually understands and enjoys troubleshooting. I talk about this a lot more in an upcoming newsletter, but in brief you need someone who’s got a troubleshooting mindset.
Of the above skills, if I had to choose only one, I’d select a tenacious problem-solver over anything else. Technical skills can always be taught—some faster than others, of course—and comfort with customer interactions can be acquired over time, but in all of my experience you can’t teach curiosity and an interest in problem-solving to someone who doesn’t have it.
Next time: so you’re going to hire a support person. What are you going to call that role?
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!