Support Shopping
18 Jan 2026 » Opinion
I have been at Adobe for more than 13 years, and this has been my only job as a consultant. I explain this because I do not have previous experience in other consulting roles. However, during all this time I have regularly seen a behavior that I want to talk about today: support shopping.
What is Support Shopping?
I do not think that there is a standard definition for this concept. In fact, I heard it for the first time from a coworker not that long ago. Since then, though, I have used it when needed and everybody understood me. If I had to provide such a definition, it would be something like:
The activity of requesting help from multiple people simultaneously, without telling them that you have also asked others.
I am sure you have seen this behavior in the past. Someone has a problem with a technology, and they ask their technical representative and their account manager, and open a ticket with support. I understand why our clients do that: they do not always know who to ask or they are in a hurry and need an urgent response. However, there are important downsides.
The Issue with Support Shopping
The main problem with this behavior is that the outcome can make things worse.
Let’s consider a scenario where a client wants to know what the best color in a particular scenario is. The client raises the question to the provider, asking four different people. Three reply “blue”, which is the one that the provider has documented as the best color, but one outlier misunderstands the question and says “pink”. It turns out that the client wanted pink as the color, as it is the color they already have. So, they go with pink. Later, when it is clear that this was the wrong color, they will claim that it is the provider’s fault, as they recommended pink.
I want to be very clear about one point: the person who replied “pink” is not to be blamed. Any of us could have done it.
The more I work with internal teams at Adobe, the more I understand the origin of this problem:
- Client Care manages dozens, if not hundreds of tickets daily. Very few are problems with the Adobe products, most are related to issues with the client implementation. They do not have the knowledge or the time to research the exact details, and will mostly fall back to the published best practices.
- Customer Success Managers (CSM) are mostly non-technical employees. They understand the technology at a high level, but their role is about value realization, not Java code.
- Account Directors (AD) lead the sales team, not the implementation team.
- Technical Account Managers (TAM) are technical and have the knowledge to support the customers, have access to backend tools, but they are not always asked first or may not have been exposed to the context needed to answer correctly.
- Consultants usually know the technical details of the implementation and most likely they have the best answer, but not all our clients have a consulting engagement.
My Solution
OK, we have a problem. What do we do about it?
The starting point is to avoid support shopping altogether. Instead, a process should be agreed with the technology provider. I cannot provide a generic process, as there are too many permutations and I have only seen what we do at Adobe.
What I can explain is what I have done with some customers, where I have been involved as an Enterprise Architect.
- All issues should be routed first to me or the TAM. We are in the best position to evaluate the problem.
- If this is something we (EA or TAM) can resolve, we just go ahead and do it.
- If we need someone else, but we know who this other person should be, we engage them.
- If the problem is related to not having a license, we will talk with the AD.
- Finally, if we see this is a product issue, we will help the client open a ticket with Client Care, making sure this ticket has all the relevant information, and we will follow up with Client Care.
Let me know in the comments if you have seen this behavior or you have implemented a different solution.
Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash