Why Support Isn't Just a Job for Me – It's a Career
By Dave Chapman
It's fair to say that not many people grow up dreaming about working in customer support. It's not the typical aspirational career path! Indeed, some see a customer support role as a stepping stone to something else or a short-term job in a break from college or Uni. After nearly a decade working in a support role here at Buffer, I've come to think of customer support as a career in its own right, and I'm more passionate about it than ever.
I've been working in the support team at Buffer for nine years, which is a significant and unusual amount of time in one job! In the tech world, people switch roles and employers more than in almost any other industry, making me even more of an outlier. There have certainly been times when the thought of moving on has popped into my mind, and I wondered if I should consider starting a new chapter. I want to share more about why I've stayed at Buffer and have no plans to leave.
First of all – why support?
I've always liked figuring things out, understanding how things work, making things better, and helping people. I feel satisfaction when I've been able to use my knowledge, experience, and skills to make a difference. I've previously worked in healthcare, where I made clinical diagnoses (focused on people) and in IT security roles (focused on tech). My customer support role at Buffer is in a sweet spot for me, where I use skills from both areas.
Working in customer support can draw on many skills you wouldn't combine in other roles. In just one day’s work, you can use a wide range of skills: emotional intelligence, predictive communication, technical knowledge, troubleshooting/diagnostics, and testing. There's also a lot of cross-team communication: we work directly with the finance team on sales admin, with the marketing team on launch planning, and we work with the product and engineering teams to support their work in improving our product and bringing new features to our customers. We’re far from being an isolated team!
Another awesome thing about support is that we need to know about the whole product, not just functionally. We need to know the ins and outs of how to use each feature, and we need to understand multiple use cases for each feature, the associated bugs, which bugs have recently been resolved for that feature, how features interact with one another, how our features differ from native features, etc. There's the potential for infinite knowledge growth. You've never 'arrived' as a knowledge expert across the entire product due to continual changes, so there's a constant challenge. However, amidst that challenge, your understanding of the resources which are at your disposal grows and gives you the confidence to continue navigating this ever-changing environment.
Second – why I've stayed at Buffer.
I joined in 2014 when we were still a start-up (Buffer was founded in 2012), and we were fewer than 20 people. The support team is currently bigger than Buffer …read more
Source:: Buffer Blog
