Wade Foster:

Good customer support matters. Great customer support sets you apart. It’s not a growth hack or a hush-hush marketing scheme; it’s common sense. People like to be treated like people.

At Zapier, we believe that the best way to help people is to put everyone on support. Around here, we call it “all hands support,” which means that every person on the team—no matter the job title—spends some portion of their day, week, or month talking directly to customers and solving problems for them.

It’s not a crazy idea, either. Many of the fastest growing companies do all hands support. When I asked my Twitter followers who is doing it, a surprising (to me) number of hands shot up. Teams like Stripe, StatusPage.io, Olark, Basecamp, Slack, Customer.io, New Relic and Wistia are all committed to an all hands approach.

So what have these companies figured out that compels them to pull engineers, executives, marketers, and more off their day-to-day tasks to spend time on support?

We practice all hands support here, it’s a tradition that works well.