I have a friend who focused his career around event planning. Unsurprisingly, he's had a rough ride during these last several months.<p>He's a great communicator with perfect English and a polite and friendly manner. He's detailed oriented and can make things happen. But his thing was live events and now they just aren't happening.<p>Does anyone here wish they had an expert communicator to help onboard new users or to be a front line for troubleshooting issues?
Those are functions of a Post-Sale role or a Customer Success role, and very often, you see them doing training to customers. In my past job, that was the primary function of the customer success team.<p>The team asked me a few times to explain technical updates and particular concepts to them to "rephrase" this explanation to the end customers. They either make 1-1 call with the clients pushing "informal" training or prepare text content that they forward by mail to the clients; they also did webinars. Still, they were more familiar to made calls. I know they have a common phrase to start, something like: "Did you know you could do X "faster/better" by using Y from software," all of this to make sure the customers receive constant training into using our software. I understand that principle or the intention here is that when the customer is well trained and uses the software at his full potential, it's better retained and more valuable.<p>Your friend looks like it will be great in a Customer Success role; you could even open it up to pre and post-sale functions. Allow him to create content to train your customers, communicate to the customers to get feedback, and push better training and understanding of your product. The goal is to maximize retention and increase conversion to post-sales.
Plenty of company do scheduled webinars for pre-sales now. Basically they walk an interested person live, video or more likely screen sharing, through the product's features. "front line for troubleshooting issues" is more or less a customer service position, isn't it?<p>Have your friend add an entry to the regular 'Who wants to be hired' thread <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring</a>
Sounds like a good idea. Because we design the software we forget that what's obvious to us might be totally incomprehensible to an end user (especially older ones) and having a buffer (people person) between you and the customers is always a good idea.