Engine Yard’s leadership believed poor customer support was behind customer attrition. They weren’t wrong about the attrition. They were wrong about the cause.
The support team wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom.
The support org was 100% remote across NYC, Manchester, and Vancouver — out of sight and out of mind at SF headquarters. Engineering had been structured into three competing teams, each with its own VP of Engineering, inside a ~100-person company. The insecurity cascaded downward: engineering teams competed with each other instead of serving customers. Support had no reliable escalation path and patched for customers on the fly.
The ticketing system was theatrical. All new tickets went to a Roadmap queue. Every six months, the VP of Engineering would declare Ticket Bankruptcy and close every open ticket. Customers were furious. The support team had weathered a revolving door of managers with long-promised raises and promotions perpetually stalled.
On day two, the SVP of Sales took me to lunch: “Your house is on fire.”
Engine Yard had roughly 10,000 customers and was planning to lay off their 23-person remote support team and outsource to a third-party vendor. Customer satisfaction sat at 73%. Standard Support was sold as a separate paid add-on — which meant most customers weren’t on it, and support existed as an invisible cost rather than a product feature.
A next-generation platform was already in development. The existing platform needed to hold customers through that transition, against a backdrop of poor data infrastructure that made it hard to measure anything.
In my first 45 days I traveled to NYC, Manchester, and Vancouver to meet every support engineer in person. What I found wasn’t a bad team — it was a neglected one. People blamed for a systemic failure they didn’t create, with raises and promotions promised and never delivered. I delivered them immediately. One engineer had already decided to move to Red Hat before I arrived. The other 22 stayed.
The VP of Engineering had a “Firemen” rotation — two devs on standby for escalated issues. I restructured it to pair one dev with one support engineer daily. Engineering needed direct exposure to real customer problems, and support engineers were the people who understood those problems best. Time-to-resolution dropped. Long-standing bugs that had never made it past Ticket Bankruptcy finally got fixed.
I introduced weekly customer satisfaction tracking via GoodData attached to Zendesk. That replaced guesswork with live operating data.
I held two all-hands meetups bringing remote support engineers to SF HQ — Sales, Marketing, Product, and all three VPs of Engineering came to present to the support team, not the other way around. Two engineers carried visible resentment that conversation wasn’t shifting. I had them carry a heavy box up three flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator — a concrete way to show that the weight they were carrying was optional. It worked.
The deeper fix was structural. Support was a cost center because the revenue model made it invisible. I bundled it into every paid offering — if you were a paying Engine Yard customer, you were paying for support, because support was already part of the product promise. Support now received a percentage of every customer invoice. Combined with a portion of the CFO’s AWS reserved instance discount allocated to support, the unit economics flipped entirely.
“I recruited Seemant into Engine Yard to lead our customer support organization. Seemant was very effective in bringing the support team together and creating a high performing team. The support team became a differentiating factor for EY in the market.”
Roger Levy · Advisor, Consultant, Mentor · Roger managed Seemant directly at Engine Yard
“He finds the issues, addresses them, and fixes them. At any stage of a business’s evolution, Seemant is invaluable.”
David Coallier · Same team, Engine Yard
“Seemant is a fearless communicator with a solid technical background. I learned a great deal observing his line of thinking and management of personalities.”
Shannon Coen · Product Leader, Tesla · Same team, Engine Yard