[Evan HamiltonParticipant]

I’m definitely going to UserConf, but my manager is concerned about having the whole team away from tickets for a whole weekday. It’s a reasonable concern, but I think it’s unreasonable to never be able to do events as a team.

How do you handle this?

[Mathew PattersonParticipant]

Campaign Monitor’s support team is 24/hr and global so we can often provide some coverage by asking people in other locations to start earlier or finish later.

Once a year we all get together for a few days as a company, and then we a) pick the least busy time of year for support and b) have a big room with internet access where all support people (and support trained people in other teams) can cycle in and out to help out for an hour.

It’s pretty tough, but it depends a lot on your volumes. When the Sydney team is at a conference, we might have everyone watching a talk, but leave one person out in the foyer answering tickets. Then we’ll swap for the next talk.

Do you have anyone back at the office who could triage and escalate a ticket if it needed urgent help?

 

[Evan HamiltonParticipant]

Thanks Mathew. Right now we don’t have anyone back at the office who can help, though I intend to change that long-term.

For now (for UserConf) we’re going to try changing our messages to say “Sorry, we’re away for the day at a conference learning how to be better at what we do!” and then work a half-day Saturday answering urgent tickets. We’ll see how it goes!

[Chase ClemonsParticipant]

Nice plan @evan!

For us, everyone in the company is trained on support tickets. It’s nice to have that for days the support team might be out at a conference or if we’re all hit by a bus.

[AyraParticipant]

Ah so glad that there’s a thread for this! I’m about to go out on vacation and was wondering what do other companies do for their phone support? I get to manage all 3 contact points. Anyone got suggestions?

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