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The eternal support team question! In my team everybody has access to DQ Time (meaning de-queue) where they can work on side projects, or take an online course, or write a doc or do anything else that somehow relates to the company or customer service.
People in my team have done things like:
- Writing up prepared responses to cover common issues in a more effective way
- Reviewing successful response to figure out how to increase our service ratings
- Researching how web fonts work in email clients and producing a report
- Coding a custom Chrome extension that saves every support person time by building in certain tools
- Mocking up a product change based on recorded feedback, and reporting to the design team
We don’t have any hard limits on how much time is available, but everyone is entitled to it and can just plan it with their team lead.
Getting out of the immediate crush of the queue is a big help for their state of mind and often lets them make something which helps all of the team.
@mathew - Love that DQ Time, although I must admit I thought of going to Dairy Queen when I saw that name.
I think having that DQ Time is super important. If you’re just answering emails all day, that can get old real quick.
I’d also add that you need to take time off work. If it’s been months since your last vacation, take one. Rest and recharge. Even just a three day weekend makes a big difference when you’re close to being burnt out.
@mathew - I’m curious. Do all of your team take advantage of this? Personally I have trouble doing this as I’m regularly focused on customers that need responses. It’s hard to not reply if a customer needs a response. And then to put the additional load of new tickets on the rest of the team seems almost selfish.
@chase - the three day weekend definitely helps. I imagine including a mandatory three day weekend every month would probably go a long way toward slowing the creep of burnout.
@andrewmoyer That is definitely a challenge, the perpetual psychological weight of knowing that there is a queue waiting.
We found initially that people struggled to do it, and did feel selfish. But that’s valuing the urgent (immediate tickets) over the important (keeping people engaged and providing better service for longer, producing docs that will benefit the whole team or all the customers, building tools to improve our service).
Part of my talk for this coming UserConf is about how I went through that same struggle (and what the outcome was), so it’s good to hear it is a shared experience.
Just to add to this actually - I did find some people would not take DQ time and would feel burnout, and sometimes I do just talk to people and assign them a non-queue project to do; for some people there’s less guilt about taking time off if it’s just another part of your job that you are expected to complete.
This might not be helpful to y’all, but we benefit from being a combo community/support team. So part of our responsibilities is working on community-building projects. Those are going to expand this year, but right now are primarily focused on providing tips to our getaway purchasers and generating social media content.
We borrowed @lanej0‘s anchor system, so every shift there’s a captain (phones and tickets), first mate (tickets & backup phones), and a free bird. The free bird doesn’t have to do phones or tickets (unless things are crazy) and gets to focus on documentation, social, community projects, etc. Three people, two shifts a day means you get to swap out pretty often. It ain’t perfect but I definitely think it’s helped!
Awesome. We’ve also had to scale up the anchor system and add a first mate (like your terminology there matey).
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