Customer support

Customer support in an EDA company goes through three phases, each of which actually provides poorer support than the previous phase (as seen by the long-term customer who has been there since the beginning) but which is at least scalable to the number of new customers. I think it is obvious that every designer at a Synopsys customer who has a problem with Design Compiler can’t simply call a developer directly, even though that would provide the best support.

There is actually a zeroth phase, which is when the company doesn’t have any customers. As a result, it doesn’t need to provide any support. It is really important for engineering management to realize that this is actually happening. Any engineering organization that hasn’t been through it before is completely unaware of what is going to hit them once the immature product gets into the hands of the first real customers who attempt to do some real work with it. They don’t realize that new development is about to grind to a complete halt for an extended period. “God built the world in six days and could rest on the seventh because he had no installed base.”

The first phase of customer support is to do it out of engineering. The bugs being discovered will often be so fundamental that it is hard for the customer to continue to test the product until they are fixed, so they must be fixed fast and new releases got to the customer every day or two at most. By fundamental I mean that the customer library data cannot be read, or the coding style is different from anything seen during development and brings the parser or the database to its knees. Adding other people between the customer engineer and the development engineer just reduces the speed of the cycle of finding a problem and fixing it, which means that it reduces the rate at which the product matures.

Eventually the product is mature enough for sales to start to ramp up the number of customers. Mature both in the sense that sales have a chance of selling it and the company has a chance of supporting it. It is no longer possible to support customers directly out of engineering. Best case, no engineering other than customer support would get done. Worst case, there wouldn’t even be enough bandwidth in engineering to do all the support. Engineering needs to focus on its part of the problem, fixing bugs in the code, and somebody else needs to handle creating test cases, seeing if bugs are fixed, getting releases to the customer and so on. That is the job of the application engineers.

During this second phase, a customer’s primary support contact is the application engineer who they work with anyway on a regular basis. But as the company scales further, each application engineer ends up covering too many customers to do anything other than support them. Since their primary function is to help sales close new business, this is a problem. Also, AEs are not available 24 hours per day which can start to be a problem as real designs with real schedules enter crunch periods. So the third phase of customer support is to add a hotline.

The hotline staff are typically not tool users, they are more akin to 911 dispatchers. Customers hate them since they are not as knowledgeable as they are themselves. Their job is to manage the support process, ensure that the problem is recorded, ensure that it eventually gets fixed, and that the fix gets back to the customer and so on. It is not to fix anything except the most trivial of problems themselves.

However, it turns out that one problem the hotline can do a lot to help with, and that is problems with licenses, license keys and the license manager. In every EDA company I’ve been involved with this has represented almost half of all support calls. EDA product lines are very complex and as a result there are a lot of calls about licenses that don’t require the intervention of engineering to get fixed.

At each phase of support, the quality (and knowledge) of the engineer directly interfacing to the customer goes down but the bandwidth of available support  increases. Engineering can only directly support a handful of customers themselves. Each AE can only directly support a handful of customers but more AEs can easily be added as sales increase. A hotline can scale to support a huge number of customers 24 hours per day, and it is easy to add more hotline engineers. The hotline can also be located in an area where it is cheaper to staff, since it doesn’t need to be in Silicon Valley.

This isn’t specifically an EDA problem. I’m sure we’ve all had experience of calling customer support for Comcast or our wireless router, and been told to do all the things we’ve already tried. It’s frustrating, but it’s also obvious that they can’t simply put us through to the guy who wrote the code in the cable modem or our router.