[aspensmonster]

>An hour at the helpdesk can help you discover great product ideas, feedback and suggestions - a gold mine when you're chasing product-market fit.

An hour with your front line support --or bothering to read through or even solicit their thoughts-- can do just as much for you, multiplied by however many support members you have. If anyone knows the flaws of your product, it's the guys and gals on the front lines that have to make excuses for it every day.

>A support rep can only go so far. Support agents often don't have the visibility in an organization to go back and fix bigger process problems. Only you can.

Speaking as someone who has done support before, and will likely continue to do so in the future in one way or another: you've got this all backwards. If anyone knows how screwed up a process is in your organization, or how broken your product is, it's the poor saps like us that are tasked with carrying those processes out and supporting those crappy products. Support agents don't lack "visibility." They lack authority and autonomy to handle issues on their own without fear of reprisal for not using the proper openers and closers and not keeping all calls under 12 minutes so they hit that magic 5 calls and 10 chats an hour marker. For all the talk of "horizontal" and "flat" organizations, most support shops have a very clearly defined hierarchy and strict control over lateral movement that blows up the very "gold mine" you're chasing after.

>When employees see their CEO on Support, they realize it's absolutely essential for them to go above and beyond call of duty to make sure their customers are more than just satisfied.

If you want "above and beyond," be prepared to compensate for it: more-than-COL raises, PTO, TOIL, year-end bonuses, above-average salaries/wages. You're the CEO. You'll go above and beyond because at the end of the day your compensation is tied directly to how well the business does financially. Front line support? We get paid the same amount no matter how easy or rough the day was, no matter how "above and beyond" we went. If anything, going "above and beyond" just means "this call will take me an hour," which means "my metrics are totally fucked for the rest of the day and possibly the week." And that could mean losing your job. Or it could just be justification for denying a raise or promotion.

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Overall, I don't think you'll really get the experience you're looking for as a CEO. Unless you insist that your support manager treat you like any other front-line support tech, with all of the same metrics, and expectations, and "rough" customers, and "in-house" problems, and hours, and compensation, and fear of reprisal, you're going to miss things by simple virtue of the fact that what you're experiencing simply isn't what actually occurs on a day-to-day basis.

[goldenkey]

Exactly. It's easy to tout this CEO on support as new age profundity but it has no basis except in dinky startup a where the CEO is most likely doing a lot of other tasks because the funds are tight or employees few. In a reasonable company, not a little hipster startup, the CEO is not going to waste time on tech support calls when they can survey their tech support workers and see an overview.

Look tech world, it's a sorry thing but a startup is just a 'small business.'