Open Discussion for Customer Support Workstream "styles"

Workstream Discussion Customer Support
1

I would like to have an open forum from today until 7/19/22 to discuss our current support team structure and ideas on how to optimize.

Some background: The Customer Support Workstream was established in Jan 2022 by me ( ) and team. The first proposal was voted in for 4 months and then it was renewed (with some significant changes) for 8 months. Around month 2 we were hit with some tough decisions as an organization to optimize our budget to weather the bear market and product changes that were upon us. The type of support we offer at this time is a similar model, albiet with less staff, to what we offered at centralized ShapeShift, which included: ticketing support, outsourced agents, and a small US based team to manage ancillary responsibilities and projects.

Current team:

Meg - Parttime, WS Leader. 20-25 hrs/week. Manages team (60% of the work and includes 1:1’s, new initiatives, setting goals, tracking performance, general team guidance, tracking budget), hiring, firing, payroll, vendor payments, leadership/governance participation, and general presentation tasks. (leaving for maternity leave in ~4 weeks)

Mogie - fulltime, Helpdesk Manager. 40 hrs/ week. Creates new helpdesk content, assists with cross team content, continual audits of current helpdesk, testing products, All Fox, All Team meetings, trainings, building training content, and escalated tickets.

Donna - fulltime, Support Manager. 40 hrs. week. Manages 3 fulltime support agents. Manages data reporting of customer support activity weekly, Ops Sprint, quality assurance of tickets, responds to Discord and tickets, holds 1:1 coaching sessions with each agent biweekly.

Carmina, Julius, and Miguel - fulltime agents. 40 hrs/week. Provide 7 day a week coverage (almost 24 hours). Responds to tickets, discord requests, and manages Problem Tickets (ongoing bugs) + pushes for App and Trust pilot reviews.

6 total people = roughly 28,500/month USDC in spend. A 38% decrease since the original proposal launched.

The question now is…is this level of support appropriate for the current standing of our product and user base?

Current site traffic: TBD with new pendo integration

Current 0x trading stats: Last month ~680 trades: 0x Tracker

Current Product Roadmap: Roughly 26 active items https://www.notion.so/shapeshift/68196f67e07943ed8bb1e10ac7d1430d?v=024c941b800e48d580630470d282e3dd (although i’m sure we’ll be having a discussion about what to prioritize moving forward in the coming days as we continue to discuss our product market fit).

With this forum post, I would like to show our current support workload data, gather feedback, acknowledge some good ideas and data that have already been presented by the Ops team, and eventually create a poll to allow the community to weigh in on what kind of support THEY want from a platform like ours.

Customer Support Ticket Activity for 2022:

https://global.discourse-cdn.com/standard10/uploads/foxcookieco/optimized/1X/2e5c9323eb95a5b603b6fbb038e88f5ab85d4b3c_2_690x416.png

~200 tickets/weekly until the end of May when things sharply declined to 100 tickets/weekly

More support data (resolution times, Discord requests, reviews) here.

Customer Support Comparison (by Ops and team): Support Compare - Google Sheets

TL:DR of support comparison chart:

Of the 20 referenced here:

25% use Zendesk as their helpdesk

50% use Gitbook or Notion for their helpdesk

30% offer Live Support Chat

35% offer email support

60% use Discord as their preferred Support interface for tickets and issues.

10% have a trust pilot score above 2.9

I will be pulling all tangible/actionable feedback into a doc to organize and piece together a few different options of “styles” to then vote on (not necessarily a formal governance vote, but a community poll). My goal is to present these options next week (on July 19th, then most likely hold a separate call later in the week for further discussion). This can help further guide my workstream’s strategy as we move into the 2nd half of our proposal. Our goal is to ensure a delightful customer experience, happy team members, and a great work culture for contributors of this DAO.

So let the discussion begin!!! 2b50

2

thank you for putting this together and opening up the discussion. Additionally, thank you and your team for the excellent support that has been provided to our customers to date.

My feeling is that the level and maturity of the support we are providing is far beyond the current product and the amount of customers / active users we believe we have. Given this I am in favor of pairing back on that level of support until we increase usage and find better product market fit. There is always a tradeoff for resources we spend on anything else besides innovating on the platform and driving users to it, especially in the current market conditions. Support is definitely key in retaining customers once on the platform, so its a delicate balance.

There are some things that I think may be more easy for us to let go of for the time being. One of those would be 24 hr support. I don’t think that is expected or required. It’s very rare across the ecosystem to find products that are free with support staff available around the clock.

I am also curious if there would be additional cost savings if we did direct users to discord as a first line of support. I think there are community members that would be able to answer some of the easier questions, or direct people to the right help desk article for example. Maybe this would cut down on the number of tickets your team needs to respond to and creating a ticket or the Support work stream would be a second line of triage if the community members in discord weren’t able to direct the user towards a solution. There may be fringe benefits of getting more users into our discord and active in the community in other ways as well here.

Finally, I would love to hear your ideas of what would be the easiest areas for us to cut back on. I think your years of experience here probably could help guide these decisions on what support functions are the most critical to customer success and what might be considered a “nice-to-have” in our current situation.