Incubation [SCP - TBD] Renew Customer Support Workstream Jan 1st - April 30th 2023

Workstream Discussion Customer Support
1

Proposal: 7 days a Week Customer Support Services for 4 Months

For years ShapeShift has been known to have some of the best customer service in the crypto space. One year after transitioning to a DAO, this fact remains. Our compact support team is full of experienced and vetted agents who our users can trust to help them out when something inevitably goes wrong within our new experience, as well as some legacy products that still exist. In an industry full of scammers/bad actors; having reliable customer support members, who can be trusted with the most sensitive of user information, is priceless. We’d love to continue offering our services in delighting users when they need a hand. Below you will see how we’ve adjusted our budget to better meet the needs of the DAO during these bearish times, while also focusing on a more Discord-centric support style.

Some of the major changes to highlight:

  • Megan will be stepping down from her role.
  • Carmina and Miguel will be moving to part time hours.
  • Donna will be on maternity leave until March.
  • Mogie will be submitting a proposal to move him to workstream leader in parallel to this proposal.

2023 Objectives:

  • Transition to a Discord-first support team by the end of January.
  • Bag 10 reviews total each month (Trust Pilot and mobile app reviews)
  • Maintain a helpdesk to educate community members and users on our products and services.
  • Continue to delight and effectively assist users with all of their crypto needs.

Transition to a Discord-first support team by the end of January.

We want to use Discord for customer support more than we use Zendesk. This means directing users who need help to go to the #contact-support channel where one of our support agents can assist them in a live chat fashion. Offering support right in Discord where the majority of our community resides will help make the ShapeShift DAO Discord a one stop shop for our users. Ticket transcripts are readily available via the Tickets Bot. Over the past month 1/2 we have noticed an uptick in Discord tickets, we want this trend to continue. We will continue to have 4 Zendesk licenses until the end of January ($500/month). Starting in February we will cut down to 2 licenses for just Mogie and Donna ($125/month and when Donna returns from leave, $250/month). Depending on ticket count and how effective Discord seems to be, we will consider ending our Zendesk account completely. While Discord is the defi community norm, there are still many users out there who are loyal to ShapeShift and do not have a Discord account, so for now Zendesk is a great tool. Zendesk also provides privacy and organizational tools that assist in providing great support.

Bag 10 reviews total each month (Trust Pilot and mobile app reviews)

We want to continue our campaign of increasing our Trust Pilot and mobile app reviews. Our goal will be 10 total each month pursued through Discord and Zendesk. We’ve seen a ton of success with this over the past year. Our current Trust Pilot score stands at 4.0! https://www.trustpilot.com/review/shapeshift.com

Helpdesk to educate community members and users on our products and services.

I have started and will continue to migrate help desk articles over to Gitbook. This is in preparation for the potential event of quitting Zendesk completely. Any suggestions for articles can be directed to @mogie. I also have a Twitter account (@DAO_Shift) used to post articles, retweet ShapeShift (and other community members), and direct users to get in contact with our support team when applicable.

Continue to delight and effectively assist users with all of their crypto needs.

Our team consists of members who have been handling crypto related customer support issues for several years. We are dedicated to helping our users and it still bums us out if we cannot find a solution for someone. Helping our users find a solution to their problem(s) and giving them the best experience possible truly makes us happy.

Misc notes:

  • No more 24/7 support, instead Mon-Fri 9am -1am (EST) with @Carmina working 5pm-1am on Sat/Sun.
  • No more LVAs - this means paying workstream members directly with USDC. No more needing Colony payouts by the 12th every month.
  • With @Mogie being the only US workstream member, he will be the main point of contact during ‘standard’ US hours.
  • @Donna will be away from work for her maternity leave from Nov 24-March ~15. She is a vital part of our team and we want to ensure she has enough time to recover before returning to work.

Staffing:

  • Workstream Leader/Helpdesk Manager - 1 @mogie

  • The helpdesk manager creates and oversees the creation, editing and auditing process of our helpdesk content.

  • As a workstream leader, Mogie will handle all US-timezone product meetings that require support representation (i.e Go/No Gos, governance calls, etc). He will handle payroll, training consultation, proposal management, cross-team communication, and other high-level needs.

  • Completing customer requests with the utmost accuracy and efficiency.

  • Support Staff Manager - @donna

  • Manager’s main role is to ensure quality support and training are provided to all support agents, responsible for staff scheduling, Zendesk management, hosting weekly meeting/huddle with support staff.

  • Completing customer requests with the utmost accuracy and efficiency.

  • Informal QA for Miguel and Carmina.

  • Scheduling

  • Build trainings

  • Create ticket flow systems for “bug incidences” to ensure proper customer communication.

  • Support Agent - Carmina

  • Completing customer requests with the utmost accuracy and efficiency.

  • Managing Trust Pilot/Mobile App reviews (reporting spam, responding, sending invites). Communicate with @0xean any negative reviews. (Once Donna returns this will be her responsibility since she will be full time).

  • Creating triage threads/reporting issues to Ops.

  • Support Agent - Miguel

  • Completing customer requests with the utmost accuracy and efficiency.

  • Weekly Ops Sprint (until Donna returns)

  • Creating triage threads/reporting issues to Ops.

Schedule

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Budget (USDC):

Carmina: 1000

Miguel: 800

Mogie: 6000

Donna: 4500

12,300 in salaries (48% decrease from current workstream budget)

+500 for Zendesk

12,800 TOTAL/month

4 month proposal if passed (Jan 1- April 30) = 51,200 USDC from the DAO

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Any and all feedback is appreciated. Thanks and gm!

3

Hey guys this is Miguel from the Support Workstream! It’s been a pleasure helping our users and working with the community. If given the same chance, I would like to continue working for the community in helping our users with their concerns/issues, providing resolutions, and contributing to the DAO to the best of my abilities! We want to continue providing the best customer service in our line of Business as I also believe that it’s one of the main reasons why people chose their providers. I appreciate all the people involved and I would still like to continue working with all of you. Cheers!

4

Hello everyone! This is Mina from the Customer Support team. It’s been a great experience being part of this team and would wish to continue in working for the community in providing great quality customer service. I’m looking forward to working again with all of you. Thank you!

5

This is Donna and I’ve worked for Customer Support since centralized ShapeShift. Working for ShapeShift has been a blast and I would love to continue delighting customers, help troubleshoot and resolve user issues. I am excited about what’s to come for ShapeShift in the near future and I hope to continue working for this community come 2023!!!

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@mogieforo -

Thanks for putting this forward. It is great to see the reduced spend for the workstream in light of the current support needs and the DAOs overall budget.

Given the current support requirements for the DAO, and a total team size of 4 people, do you think that 2 people with titles of manager are required?

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Hi @0xean

Appreciate you commenting! You make a valid point. I could change my job title to simply “Workstream leader” and put “Help Desk Content Creator” in the job description - along with changing Donna’s title to “Support Team Lead”.

The thinking behind giving Donna the ‘manager’ title is because she is experienced in a manager type role and she works in PHT, which makes it easier for her to meet regularly and assist our two support agents.

Are the titles the main point of concern/question or are you suggesting that in general our team only needs one manager/leader?

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@mogieforo - definitely not worried about titles and not suggesting the team structure is wrong, but was more curious your thoughts on a small team needing two people in leadership / manager type roles.

9

I am the main point of contact for Support during US hours. Because of the time difference, our entire team meets just once a week (early for me, late for them).

I think it makes sense to have Donna (a manager) be online at the same time as our agents. It also makes sense to have me on during US hours when the majority of our workstream members are online.

That being said, Donna is currently on maternity leave (ML) and will be back in March. So we will have a few months (pending the approval passing) of just having one manager (me). Depending on how it works out we can consider restructuring on the next proposal come May.

edit: holy shih I use a lot of parentheses

10

understood and thanks for the response!

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I wanted to acknowledge that I (on behalf of the Operations Workstream) have posted a counter proposal to this proposal: http://forum.shapeshift.com/thread/realign-support-responsibilities-under-the-operations-workstream-41435

12

I just want to say, I appreciate that you guys have worked hard to bring the costs down. And, while I think this proposal does a better job of being more DAO focused (ie Discord first), I feel that the cost to the DAO is hard to justify. A point i’d also like to bring up is that since the formation of the DAO, I have personally felt like Support has been operating on an island and could be more cross-collaborative with the other Workstreams. I would love to know (for example) if there are trends in tickets or UX issues that pop up, etc and what they are about. Perhaps this is partly a failure on my part, for not pro-actively reaching out to get the information. However, I feel that a regular office hours or regular call with the community would resolve this. All we generally hear at the Ops Sprint is how many tickets there were, and the time it took to resolve them.

13

Hi fellow DAO members.

I have been following ShapeShit’s transition to a DAO with interest. Congrats on taking on the challenge! Hopefully, more organizations can follow in your footsteps. You are still using too many centralized services for my liking but hopefully, you can transition your support operations over time.

I have just watched the recent ShapeShiftDAO Governance Community Call - 12/1/22 on Twitch and heard about the support proposal so thought I would pop in and say hi and request a place on the support team :slight_smile: I have been involved in open-source projects and have been a DAO contributor for a few years. I am passionate about privacy, decentralization, and freedom. Working for a DAO to me is the best job in the world. I have very limited experience with ShapeShift. I used it prior to KYC but never used it when KYC was introduced. The move to being a DAO is what spiked my interest so I have been following along.

Anyways, just wanted to express my interest to help out with support. I am keen to learn more about ShapeShift and like helping users access decentralized and noncustodial platforms.

Also, I do not want any dirty fiat. Happy to be compensated in FOX for any value I can bring :slight_smile:

If there could be room for me in the DAO just let me know what would be required.

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Hi @BeDiggy I resonate with the feedback about being on an island, because in my entire support career (as well as many fellow peers who work in the support space) it’s the nature of this line of work. While product is continually moving forward in projects and vision, support has and always will be spinning the plate of learning new updates, the current system issues facing users daily, and older legacy products. In my time at ShapeShift, Inc I would try and push myself into any meeting possible to make sure we weren’t blindsided by an update to the product the day before - and still there would be meetings I would know nothing about and we’d be bamboozled by a new update the day before…but we get it, it’s hard to hear everything, so we’d scramble and make sure to get the job done.

My team, especially Donna, has done a fantastic job attending any and all product focused meetings and relaying that information back to the team in weekly, distilled updates.

We’ve hit our goals, gave people excellent support, continued to increase our reviews, created useful helpdesk material that gets thousands of hits each month. We understood that the cost was too high for this bear market…so we cut our budget by ~50% and I left to let the leaner, trained up team take over. This team can rock. I truly believe they will be a huge asset in the coming months. This team is a small package of A LOT of talent and legacy and present knowledge of our product. They know how to protect users from scams. In this DAO environment, we need this.

15

I suspected there might be another conversation around merging the workstreams. I realize Hpayne is up for Marketing Lead (which I love, I think he’ll be great), I do feel as if a lot of responsibilities are falling on your plate as a leader (Ops, Support, and Marketing - that I’m sure you’ll still very much be involved with). With the small team we’re proposing at a low cost, I think it’s most beneficial for the DAO to keep a dedicated support team, but perhaps it could be rolled into Ops, but keep the current team members and move to the Discord-first model but still take advantage of Zendesk and this team’s talent and trustworthiness.

16

Just to add here, I do think calling them both “managers” is a bit of a semantic error that Mogie cleared up. Donna has a lot of the manager experience and overall organizational skills that a support team needs, while Mogie has built and organized our current helpdesk system + being the US lead who can crush customer issues, attend community events, and help us achieve our Discord-first model.

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That’s awesome to hear!!! I’m leaving the support team, but I’m sure the team will be happy to know there’s interest out there. With this bear market, it’s actually a debate whether or not we even need a support team right now. I believe it’s crucial for operations. With that being said, I don’t think the team will be expanding right now…but perhaps soon (come on markets!!!)

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Has anyone considered moving to a fee-per-ticket model?

That way support costs downscale in down markets and/or with less user activity.

Compensation is then based on the number of tickets rather than fixed compensation (reminiscent of a salary model).

The approximate costs in my experience are $20 per support ticket.

This also incentivizes:

  • Marketing to building community engagement (ie users having problems answered by other users so no cost).

  • Operations to bug fix issues in a timely manner.

  • The creation of knowledge bases (forms, wikis, etc) for users to find the answer themselves or be directed to by support

$12,800 does seem a lot for an average of 84.3 tickets/week ($38 per ticket) and that is going forward. If you look back it means the support tickets have been costing about $56 per ticket whilst at current budgeting levels.

To be successful a DAO needs to spend less than they make. The issues with budgets are not so much bear cycle economics but legacy financial overheads that need to be trimmed now ShapeShift is transitioning to a DAO. I am not picking on support, I could say the same about a lot of the budget proposals.

Has the pros and cons of the DAO compensating for delivered work vs what appears to be a contactor model coming from the legacy employee/employer relationships been discussed anywhere?

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Cool, I left a comment on your post.

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Thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts.

Support deals with users directly, most workstreams do not. In a way we kind of operate in the background by the nature of the job but yes I can see how you think we’ve been operating on an island due to lack of community calls. I am always willing to chat with you/Product and provide any data you want. I would also be open to the idea of hosting some community calls. Keep in mind that I have not been the workstream leader before and would love to step up and show the community how passionate I am about helping our users. How much spend for a Support budget are you willing to justify?