How a year in Customer Success made me a better developer
After working as a one woman customer success team for a year, I decided to make the transition to becoming a developer. I was frustrated by having to pass off the problems I found to someone else to fix. I wanted to be able to figure them out and solve them instead of pushing work on another person. It’s been a year since I made that switch, and here are a few things I brought from my past life that made me a better developer.
Empathy
This is commonly confused with sympathy, especially when it comes to customer success. The difference is when you have empathy you are able to put yourself in another person’s shoes, you’re not just feeling sorry for them. Working in customer success you exercise empathy for people all day. You understand their frustration when something they rely on isn’t working, and you feel their excitement when they gush about how your product changed their life. You get a true sense of the power of the product and the company for when you interact with it’s customers.
When I transitioned to a development role, I had that understanding and empathy for customers already ingrained in my head and heart. I know when there is a bug that it can’t just be put on a to-do list and forgotten. I also get excited when building something new that our customers are going to love. I still get to help them, of course with a tonne of help from wonderful product managers, but in a new way.
Prioritization
Being a one person team meant handling phone calls, live chats, and emails all day. Some need immediate answers, some can wait, but all need to be prioritized. Anything blocking someone from using the product was at the top of the list, other issues were in between, and feature requests usually fell to the bottom. A hard part of this for me was learning that the person making the most noise didn’t need the most attention.
Development follows a lot of these same priorities. Major issues can require you to drop everything and focus on fixing a blocker, but with smaller bugs you can take time to evaluate and prioritize accordingly. Again, they are all important but you need to know the best way to prioritize them and why.
Communication
Of course you also learn how to talk to people. Not just customers, but your teammates. You need to be able to explain an issue and exactly how to reproduce it, how many people it’s effecting, what devices it’s on and a million other things. Being able to speak simply and high level to a customer and more technical and in depth to a developer is an incredibly helpful skill. It allows me to explain what I’m working on and the relevance to anyone within or outside of a company. Even my grandparents, but they still just say it’s “computery”.
Plus, everyone likes to work with nice people. If you spend any time in customer service (and you’re good at it) you learn how easy it is to be nice to people. You know how to be open and helpful and that will take you far in life.
Appreciation
Working in customer support gives you an honest appreciation for every other person who does it. As an introvert it was always tough for me to answer that call, and talk to people all day. I always said I wasn’t very good at it despite what other people would tell me. It is not an easy job to do, and the people who do it well can make your day. They truly are advocates and fighters for the customers.
I understand the importance of the customer success front line. I know they need to be involved in development decisions and kept updated on issues. If I’m working on a bug that they have been emailed about 50 times this week I’m going to keep them updated and let them know when the fix is out. If there’s an issue blocking users I’m going to listen to why they feel it’s a high priority. They are supporting our customers and we need to be supporting them.
There are of course a bunch of other things customer success taught me that helped me in my career, but these were the most apparent. If you’re thinking about making the switch I hope this helped you feel a little more confident.
If you liked this post, we are friends now. If you didn’t, we can still be friends. If you feel the need to leave a hurtful or disrespectful comment, please head to your local animal shelter instead and pet some pups who need it. It will make you feel better.
