Benefits of having a Support Software Engineering (SSE) team
At Popmenu Engineering, we put quality first. This carries out two important goals: Giving our customers a world-class experience and fostering a sense of pride in the product amongst employees who sell the software and aid our customers.
The SSE team is one aspect of how we work towards improving quality.
What an SSE team brings to the table:
- Add technical knowledge and expertise that the customer success team lacks
- Provide analysis for issues to reduce time suck for development
The SSE team occupies the rich space between the customer success team and development teams. They supply a much-needed technical liaison to the customer success team and provide detailed analysis to the development team to drive quick issue resolution and reduce time suck. In addition, the SSE team works on small bug fixes and minor feature enhancements to free up development teams for larger-scale feature implementations.
What mix of SSE has worked for us:
- 3–4 person team (depending on application size/complexity)
- A mix of Technical Support and Junior Level Software Engineers
- Rotating Software Engineers from Development squads
For us at Popmenu, the ideal SSE team currently consists of Technical Support with extensive knowledge of the product and 2–3 junior-level software engineers. This supplies a training ground for developing an in-house talent pool to distribute to regular Development teams/squads later as either Software Engineers or Quality Assurance Engineers.
Rotating Software Engineers from Dev squads enhances SSE troubleshooting knowledge and exposes them to broader development ability, and in turn, expands the world view of the rotating Software Engineers benefiting the company as a whole.
What do we track:
- Number of tickets in ‘Reviewed’
- How long tickets stay in ‘Reviewed’ and ‘SSE Working on it’
One of the more important aspects of keeping the SSE team on track is providing the tools for tracking tickets. We are currently using ‘Monday’ but are moving towards using Salesforce for ticketing.
It is essential to set up a strategy to keep said tickets flowing and not stagnating. Identifying an ideal cadence for addressing tickets helps maintain the integrity and freshness of the data and helps establish easy-to-follow metrics. At Popmenu, we have found that addressing tickets within a two-week to a one-month window, depending on the criticality, is ideal.
Coming from organizations without SSE teams, I have seen the benefits of having one from day one. The customer success team gets technical support, and development gets the initial research taken care of. Win-win for everyone involved.
