By Rachel Andrew CHAPTER 11product doesn’t do a certain thing. Keeping a record of those helps you see
if the lack of a certain feature is encountered again and again.
Even less obvious are the points where customers have to jump
through a few hoops to make something work in your product. In Perch,
there are a lot of things you can do by writing a small amount of PHP,
but many customers don’t know PHP. We can save people the trouble of
working out what to do by adding a simple function for frequently re-
quired tasks, allowing customers to just grab the code from examples in
the documentation. This is the reason why I think it is very important that
the product’s developers also help out with support. Unless you see these
types of issues come in, and think like a developer to solve them, they may
get missed.
Customer support can be seen as a distraction by developers, as Josh
Emerson from Clearleft explains, “Customer support can be very distract-
ing. It has a tendency to pull you away from work and take you out of
a state of flow.” However, he also understands the benefits of involving
developers in supporting the customers whom they write code for: “The
major benefit of having a developer handle customer support is that it
allows them to directly make changes to improve the product based on
customer feedback.”
I strongly believe that developers should be involved in support. In a
larger company, however, you can manage people’s time so they help with
support without it becoming a distraction when they are writing code. For
example, at 37signals all of the developers are involved in support, with
everyone taking it in turns to spend a day working with customers.
Later in this chapter I’ll discuss the tools that you can use to do tech-
nical support, but when setting up any system I would advise finding a
way to collect all these types of feature requests and ideas that customers
mention. They represent a goldmine of information when working out
what features you’ll add to future versions of your product.
In addition to feature requests for future capabilities, watch out for
those that are already present but the customer just hasn’t discovered yet.