[Alex MozesParticipant]

Do you have coverage on the weekends? If so, how do you do it? Did you hire people to work exlusively weekends, or does your team take turns covering weekend shifts? What did you find were the biggest challenges in getting weekend or off hours support running smoothly?

[Mathew PattersonParticipant]

Hey Alex,

Great question. Here’s how it has worked at various stages of the Campaign Monitor support team:

• Me doing it all myself, and taking some time off on Monday
• All our support agents taking weekends on a rotating schedule (and having a day off the next week)
• One person working full time Wednesday to Sunday
• One person Wed-Sun, one person Sat to Wed (as of next month)

For us the weekend load is significantly smaller, and my team could work at home so it wasn’t too burdensome for them. It was definitely a great day when we had someone who was paid specifically to work the weekend though.

The main challenges, apart from finding someone to do it, have been with making sure the weekend person gets the same education and growth opportunities, and has access to the support they may need when it’s the weekend.

[Phil ThompsonParticipant]

Hey Alex,

Like Mathew, we have a much lower support load on the weekends - which makes life a little easier. That being said we started weekend support because the emails from Friday night, Saturday & Sunday just proved too much to conquer in a reasonable time come Monday morning.

So we started out on a monthly rotating volunteer basis. Every month we’d offer up the available weekend shifts for the following month to our team. If you worked a weekend shift you’d be given a lieu day that you could use when you wanted. So if someone wanted some extra time for vacations they’d sign up.

The problem with this was two fold:

1. There wasn’t a lot of reliability/predictability. Every weekend it was always different people so it was hard to keep track of who was working when.
2. We had a lot lieu time floating around - that could potentially make scheduling in the future very difficult if a lot of people wanted to take time off.

So we changed it up. We asked for volunteers that would be on a permanent weekend rotation. As such they would work either Saturday or Sunday and would take a specific day off during the week. As our weekend support load picked up, we simply asked for more volunteers to add into the mix. The more people we added, we were able to start staggering shifts. So person A would do their shift Saturday Morning, person B Saturday evening. Then Sunday morning/evening, etc.

Since each of the volunteers only works 1 weekend day, they only miss out on 1 normal business day. So it’s still easy to make sure they are in the loop and feel part of the team. Typically Thursday and Friday’s are much lighter for us, so that’s when the weekend crew would take their day off each week.

 

[Julie EdwardsParticipant]

Hey Alex! I remember replying to a similar thread a while back. Looks like there was some good discussion there: https://community.uservoice.com/forums/topic/how-do-you-handle-weekendoff-hours-support/

[Nalani StillParticipant]

I sort of deal with this because I live overseas where we have a Sunday-Thursday workweek and we’re 8/7 hours ahead of EST/EDT. It usually means checking email regularly to keep up with outside as well as internal communication. It’s definitely something I’ve tried to use to pitch myself for user support positions with companies.

But it’s nice to be able to send off emails “overnight” and have them waiting nice and pretty in people’s inboxes in the morning!

[Alex MozesParticipant]

Great thread link @Julie, thanks!

Just to follow up on this, our team had our first ever weekend coverage this past weekend (woot!) and it did exactly what we’d hoped: salvaged our Mondays.

For some background, we average around 400 tix/ weekday and 150-200 per weekend day. We were understaffed until a few weeks ago, and the weekend load would often leave us scrambling to catchup all the way to Wednesday/Thursday. The goal of weekend support was to handle this inbound enough to ensure Mondays weren’t always a depressing look and an insurmountable pile of overdue tickets.

We have team of 5 contract agents who help with our basic proceedural tickets (refunds, acct management, passwords, etc) which make up about 60-70% of our ticket volume. We worked with that team to offer a rotating schedule shift, so each week there will be two people who did 3 weekdays plus Sat/Sun. We were also lucky enough to have a local team member willing to be the point person and answer tougher weekend tickets in exchange for Thursdays off.

The initial result was as advertised: by resolving most of the tickets that were piling up on weekends, we’ve been able to level our support load and have much happier Mondays.

Thank you all for the advice!

 

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