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…[Read more]

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.

@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…[Read more]

I’d be interested to hear what sort of thing would you put on your report card, Ayra.

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…[Read more]

I totally understand the concern about saying “look at this awesome person!” and how that might effect other people on the team.

In my experience (and assuming you have a team of people who are engaged), everybody already knows who the high performers are and they would really like to know what they are doing differently so they can do it…[Read more]

We allow our remote support team members a certain budget, tell them what they’ll need to be able to do, and let them make their own decision on which machine they get.

For myself, a more capable computer that I find more enjoyable to use would be soooo much better than $500 in cash. You’ll use that computer all day every day, so even a small…[Read more]

Good question Ted.

We tend to take this approach:

Restate their request or suggestion in your own words, to make sure they know that you understand what they are asking for
Let them know that you can understand why it would be useful or important in their situation
Dig in a little if the underlying problem isn’t clear (because maybe you can…[Read more]

Nice post darling!

Here’s a small excerpt from a legitimate feature request ticket I once received:

I was just sitting here, being all frustrated and tired, and dozed off into a rather destructive dream, where I was driving a futuristic battle tank through some west coast valley. But unlike the Flintstones I was not just rolling around waving at…

[Read more]

It’s a very fine line - sometimes, especially with remote teams doing email support, it’s really valuable to be able to have other people see what you’ve been dealing with, and say “Yes, that is super frustrating”.

But you really need to be careful to always push it towards constructiveness; could the documentation be improved to cover this…[Read more]

I’m arriving on Tuesday the 16th, and I’d love to get together with some like minded folk again before the conference.

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…[Read more]

We use pending and resolved as a convenient way to trigger a request for feedback only when we think we’ve actually resolved their issue. It sucks when you just have to ask a customer for some more details like “which account are you referring to” and then “hey, have we solved your question? Give us feedback!” pops up automatically.

It’s also…[Read more]

We use http://NiceReply.com which integrates with our helpdesk and has a good API that we use to avoid their ugly default pages. It does a good job of showing the feedback and linking back to the ticket that generated the response.

Here’s a helpful blog post from a design perspective about how we encourage feedback.

At Campaign Monitor we have gone through a few phases as our volume increased:

Just me, doing support on Saturday and Sunday and taking half monday off to make up for it
All our support team rotating through, getting the following Monday off to make up for it
Hiring a person who works full time, Wednesday to Sunday in Sydney timezone
Adding 2…[Read more]

Hey Jon,

No plans in that direction I’m afraid, as it’s really dependent on all the existing pieces we had in place. I looked at a bunch of products but couldn’t find anything that was great for us. It’s nice to work at a place with the design and engineering skills (and the will) to make our own.

I’m sure its very gauche to bump your own post after 8 months, but I wanted to say thanks again for the conversation here, and point you all to a blog post I just released:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/4075/yoda-our-support-ally

It talks about the knowledge base we eventually did design and implement, and the impact that has had for…[Read more]