Engine Yard, a platform-as-a-service provider with approximately 10,000 customers, was planning to lay off their 23-person remote support team and outsource support to a third-party vendor. The support organization was viewed as a cost center, customer satisfaction scores sat at 73%, and Standard Support was sold as a separate paid add-on ($30-50/month) rather than being bundled with the product.
My manager departed six weeks after I joined, leaving me to lead the transformation.
Team Investment & Retention: Conducted a world tour over three months, meeting all 23 remote team members in person. Discovered career stagnation was the core issue. Immediately addressed overdue promotions and raises, and created pathways for two team members to transition into engineering roles.
Engineering Partnership: Created a “Firemen” daily rotation pairing one product engineer with one support engineer. This arrangement surfaced long-standing product bugs directly to engineering and dramatically reduced time-to-resolution for persistent customer issues.
Metrics Implementation: Introduced weekly customer satisfaction tracking to establish accountability and measure improvement.
Business Model Innovation: Proposed bundling Standard Support into the core product offering rather than selling it as an add-on. This counterintuitive move meant 100% of customers now had support (vs. a fraction who paid extra), but the support cost was built into product pricing. This reframed support as a product differentiator rather than an optional expense.
Key Insight: Support quality is a product decision, not an operational expense. By embedding support into the product value proposition, customer success becomes a competitive advantage that drives retention and reduces churn—which for a PaaS company with usage-based pricing, directly impacts revenue.