Important for the product based organization, Software engineers should also act as Tech Support at least twice a month. read more…
- Fights “Development in a vacuum” syndrome. It’s valuable to gain exposure to how users use the app. Until I finally saw this as a young developer, I didn’t realize what a crappy UI developer I was. All I cared about was coding and not design, analysis or the user’s perspective.
- Delivery product to the target audience in a better way. They can simply the UX issues for the customer which cause more customer satisfaction.
- Software engineers can also realize the pain of Support Staff and simplify his life after delivering a better product.
- Developers that are not as good as they think they are can be humbled (although there’s no guarantee you’ll get this benefit; some devs are truly oblivious, selfish, and stubborn).
- Developers will gain domain knowledge. This is critical if your developers are to eventually become better at identifying and filling in the gaps the business analysis phase (assuming there is any) misses.
- Good support is a marketing point. If you do it well, clients will come to appreciate it. And a well-rounded developer with communication skills and domain knowledge is capable of doing this well. However, I would still prefer that applications be of high enough quality that they don’t need support. Superior quality is its own form of customer support (and also a marketing point).