Support Isn’t a Dumpster for Bad Process

Technical support is often treated like the organizational junk drawer. Every bug that slips through QA? Toss it at support. Every half-baked requirement that leaves users confused? Support will deal with it. Every flaky integration that was rushed to meet a deadline? Yep, support’s problem now.

Let’s be real: support teams end up holding the bag for everyone else’s shortcuts. And while they’re cleaning up the mess, leadership wonders why customer satisfaction is in the toilet.

Here’s the thing, support isn’t supposed to be the dumpster for bad process. They’re the frontline. The ones hearing the truth from customers unfiltered. They see the patterns that devs miss and the broken handoffs that BSAs don’t catch. If you ignore their perspective, you’re basically burning money on repeat failures.

So what’s the fix?

• Elevate support data. Stop treating tickets as complaints. They’re insights. Mine them.
• Close the loop. Every issue support touches should flow back to the root cause, requirements, dev, QA, release process, whatever.
• Respect the expertise. Support isn’t “entry-level.” The best support engineers have encyclopedic product knowledge and Jedi troubleshooting skills.
• Redraw responsibility. If support is constantly solving the same issues, that’s not “support doing its job.” That’s a process failure upstream.

Support should be the smoke alarm, not the fire department. If your alarms are going off nonstop, the problem isn’t the alarms, it’s your house catching fire every week.

Stop throwing your garbage at support. Start fixing your process.