Kayak.com Makes Developers Do Customer Support

Great find, thanks! My favorite quote from this was:<p>"If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions anymore."

He lives this. I once sent in some feedback via Kayak's web form, and got a (brief) personal reply from Paul English within 24 hours.<p>&#62; "We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes."<p>That's a clever little social hack.

As a developer, I'm not so sure that I buy this. I mean, I get it, developers are going to know how to deal with the bugs much quicker than a customer would. But does it scale well? If I was constantly interrupted by a loudly ringing code I can assure you that my code is going to be a poorer quality than if I had been able to work on it undistracted. So distractions lead to bad code leads to more distractions... that could be a really vicious cycle.<p>As someone else pointed out, you have to judge the process by its fruits. It looks like it's working for them, but it would drive me crazy.

This page seems to randomly show the feedback phone number:<p><a href="http://www.kayak.com/feedback" rel="nofollow">http://www.kayak.com/feedback</a><p>Hit refresh a few times.<p>Perhaps they don't like the phone ringing that much after all?

"On any given day, you might find him tracking down potential hires, going for a run with his software engineers, or personally answering calls to Kayak's customer hotline." &#60;- what is this? software engineers don't run ;)<p>Honestly, he seems very down to earth and genuinely happy. I also like how he doesn't have a problem constantly checking his email unlike all these productivity blogs and such saying its the worst thing you could ever do. I feel my behavior is somewhat vindicated in being one of those differences that doesn't really make a difference.

I welcome the idea and practice so wholeheartedly that I feel the use of word "make" in the title is inappropriate.<p>It implies that the developers at Kayak.com are forced to do something outside of their responsibility -- it certainly would sound stupid to say "XYZ.com Makes Developers Do Proper Coding", however, both practice lead to the same outcome -- better product.

Cool article! Although for me what stood out in the article was not that he made his developers do customer support, it was his work ethic and his outlook on life.<p>I like it that he advocates "work really hard for 40 to 45 hours a week, but we believe in people having strong personal lives". Makes for a more balanced life and ultimately a more sustainable company.

Rather than hoping that employees recognize patterns in customer communications, it might be better for a group of employees to review a sampling of emails and figure out some common root causes. Perhaps they already do this...