Hey everyone! Tech support is a funny thing. To most people out there, it's viewed as being frustrating to both give and receive, and as something we all love to hate. That being said, would you believe me if I told you that Dropbox support is one of the happiest places on earth? Another piece of random trivia: Would you believe me if I told you that my first job at Dropbox was support? Support at Dropbox is much more than just answering support tickets all day. Dropbox's support engineers (note 'engineers') are hired for their nerd cred and passion, and we can easily make the claim that we're sporting one of the most brilliant support staffs in the world. Because most of this team is comprised of engineers who come from well developed programming backgrounds, this gives us the flexibility to do some pretty cool stuff:
- First, the support team at Dropbox builds its own internal tools to streamline ticket-squashing and runs its own analytics to measure and analyze trends in support. One tool that blends both of these aspects is Firebat, which examines the frequency of certain responses we've been giving and allows us to nip those issues in the bud.
- Because of a similar technical background across the board, working out solutions for a problem is often as easy as walking over and chatting with the engineer behind the feature.
- Feature requests encountered in tickets are easily translated into working features that you all know and love: the edu campaign, selective sync, iPhone app features, and much more.
As awesome as this all is, support still does have to do its share of tickets too. Support is currently run off a heavily modified
Zendesk, and pretty much everything we need to field questions are available from one view. One of the best parts about running support is how easy it is -- every Dropbox client in the world is tied into our support interface, making it simple to view and debug every support issue people run into, without needing to ask 80 questions to figure out the root to a problem. Also, and perhaps most importantly, Dropbox's philosophy toward support is one of prevention rather than reaction. This means that Dropbox's support engineers are always actively finding ways to make sure any info you're looking for is easily and quickly available without you needing to contact support. Our efforts have paid off too -- by virtue of this kind of effort and all the support tools we've developed over time, we've taken daily ticket count from 5 per 100,000 users down to 2 per 100,000 users over the course of a year. When you extrapolate that out a bit, that's a crapload of tickets! Sounds pretty awesome right? In a nutshell, Dropbox support puts you on the frontlines of making millions of people happy while still offering you the challenges to polish your chops, regardless of your background. If this sounds like the kind of stuff that's right up your alley, and you want to be part of something huge,
you should definitely apply!
