Sometimes, supporting a platform is harder than building one.
Not just harder, Kafkaesque. And most often, thankless.
Remember when the site launched? With dead-pan fanfare and the kind of collective relief usually reserved for a near-death experience on a budget airline.
Gamely, we all agreed to look the other way - tagging the remaining bugs “known issues” buried two clicks deep in a remote corner of Confluence. Shipped!
The CEO even wrote a luke-warm email of gratitude in the way they do when obliged to display leadership qualities.
The agency all-hands buzzed with emoji applause. A flicker of muted pride.
Then comes The Ask.
“We’d like a support agreement.” A phrase that sounds like a pre-nup but costs more to get out of.
It’s an innocent enough request. But let’s be honest: they don’t mean ‘support’, do they? They mean, unconditional love.
All the roles. All the time. At a fraction of the cost.
Fix the bugs.
Add new features.
Tell us what’s wrong. And what’s possible.
Translate grunts into Jira tickets.
And document everything like you’re the FBI.
Be mother, father, therapist, detective, teacher, priest, and the IT guy who resets the router.
All for the low, low price of 8 billable hours a week. Meticulously rationed across three time zones and a multiplex of chat channels.
Meanwhile, the sales team are clinking glasses down in Soho. Celebrating the deal they closed but will never, ever manage.
They talk about a “Managed Service” like it’s a spa treatment. As if it comes with hot stones, soft towels and a Gantt, so perfect, it auto-delivers.
The sales team aren’t telling lies, exactly. More like bedtime stories for procurement. But either way, their work is done. The sale is sold. They're gone.
And now, their promises show up as passive-aggressive tickets assigned directly to you.
“It’s broken. Can’t log in.”
What is? Are you sure? Let’s see.
Is it a bug? Or a feature request in heavy disguise.
Has someone forgotten their password, again?
Or forgotten to mention a config setting switched last week?
The client brays; you are the experts. You built this. Why don’t you know… everything?
You dance the dance. You investigate. Check DevOps. Ask around. You emit a long, low sigh. It’s that same issue from last March. Logged. Fixed. Forgotten.
The tragedy of repetition isn’t just inefficiency. It dulls the heart. It hurts the soul.
The lead dev who built this thing has moved on to the next billable project.
The junior dev learning the ropes - doesn’t know the history.
The PM doesn’t yet have the battle scars to hold the line.
But your client doesn’t care about any of that. Because from their perspective: “We’re always on and it’s always urgent.”
This is Support purgatory.
Not enough work for a full-time role.
Too much noise for Customer Success to ignore.
And somehow you have become the main character in this badly written soap opera.
But wait!
What about chatbots?
Could they help us? A “Conversational AI” vendor has promised us sunlit uplands.
But what we got was little more than a glorified FAQ with amnesia. FAQ me.
The client didn’t fall for it either.
They can smell a canned response quicker than you can say “sorry to hear that”.
Now they ring your phone direct. At 6:17pm.
While you’re chopping onions.
Because they don’t want to open a ticket. They want to hear your voice. Feel your reassurance.
And no chatbot ever felt like that.
So, support becomes firefighting. Only you’re beating the flames with an old, damp company hoodie. There’s no automated sprinkler system here. No high-power hose.
The flames never really extinguish, do they?
Knowledge lives in people’s heads.
And your best engineers are stuck answering questions that shouldn’t need asking. Grinding their teeth.
All while pretending everything is fine. Because ‘we’ said it would be.
Most teams are forced to endure this pain. We didn’t want to accept that.
So we built something. Something that remembers, learns, and actually helps.
And it’s so close now.
More on this coming very soon.
Comments