SUMMARY: A counter proposal to: [SCP - TBD] Renew Customer Support Workstream Jan 1st - April 30th 2023 A proposal to transfer all customer support , ticket and helpdesk responsibilities to the Operations Workstream without renewing the Support Workstream after December, with no additions to the Current Operations Budget.
ABSTRACT: The intention of this proposal is a renewed update of the strategy first presented in the previously posted and discussed forum post: [SCP-TBD] - Sunsetting the Support Workstream Proposal The ideas, sentiment, and data from the previous post of this strategy have only grown to further support the realignment of support resources required to match the DAOs current needs.
MOTIVATION: The average ticket count per week, since the previous proposal for the sunsetting of the Support Workstream was posted, is now at 84.3 tickets/week. When this was last suggested the Average ticket/week number was 181.5. This shows the demand for support has decreased an additional 53% over that time period. When this information was last presented, the Support workstream took it on themselves to do discovery and work with the community on addressing the concerns that were raised in this post here: Open Discussion for Customer Support Workstream “styles” but did not engage or further the discussion beyond the initial introduction of the topic. While there have been salary reductions introduced and enacted, addressing the DAO’s current support needs seems to have been neglected. Help Desk article generation and maintenance will easily be absorbed into current Operations procedural best practices of releases at no additional cost, or could be bountied out for much much less per average article. These articles have already begun to be exported to a much cheaper and already budgeted solution the DAO already pays for in gitbook. A demo of the future ShapeShift DAO helpdesk can be viewed here. If this proposal passes Operations will continue the transition of the helpdesk to gitbook and remove the dependency and cost of the helpdesk. Under this proposal, current support operations would be moved full time to Discord to be monitored and adminned by the current Operations Workstream team. It will remove the ticketing system utilized by Zendesk, removing the cost of Zendesk from any DAO budgets completely. This functionality is already available in our current Discord and would take very little changes to be transitioned to our main form of support ticketing. Tyler | ShapeShift and Tshifty both have years of combined customer support experience at Shapeshift doing this exact role, and are extremely familiar with the responsibilities, resources, procedures, and best practices. The rest of the Operations Workstream have been providing troubleshooting and general customer support help in the Discord since they all joined the DAO; any further training to maintain the same level of quality support ShapeShift users are accustomed to can be easily implemented. Operations acknowledges and appreciates all of the hard work that was made by the Support Workstream through the years with ShapeShift to keep our support services top tier in the industry. This proposal includes a 1 month Severance payment for all contributors current salaries listed in: [SCP - TBD] Renew Customer Support Workstream Jan 1st - April 30th 2023.
SPECIFICATION: Do not renew the Support Workstream and transition support responsibilities to the Operations Workstream. Transfer ownership of the Support Zendesk permissions and transition to the free tier as soon as possible with a final transfer to Gitbook as the new helpdesk home. Provide 1 month of Severance pay to all support workstream contributors on Jan 1st 2023. Provide Support in Discord via Operations Assistants (1 assistant per shift, buddy system for coverage) that would mirror and align inside the current regression testing responsibility schedule. Update all mentions of live chat and support redirects to the Discord Address any other current assumed Support responsibilities (lobby.so, etc) with the DAO to sunset or continue as extra-curricular responsibilities based on the communities desire to fund and focus.
Budget: Severance to be paid in USDC on January 1st:
What This Proposal Would Do: Move ticket response, zendesk permissions, help desk: maintenance, QA, and admin responsibilities for all support services of the ShapeShift DAO to the Operations Workstream and provide 1 month Severance to the above listed Support Workstream contributors.
BENEFITS: This proposal will save the DAO $38,900 in USDC from now through April 30th and realign our current support resources to more accurately reflect the current needs of the DAO. This would also reduce touches, context required, and middlemen in the process of bug reporting to resolution.
DRAWBACKS: Support transition may result in temporarily increased ticket response time.