Realign Support responsibilities under the Operations Workstream

Proposal Discussion
1

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:

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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.

2

I appreciate all the hard work and analysis that went into this proposal and it sounds like a good, cost effective solution. But I would love to hear others thoughts as well. I also wonder if you would consider allocating a bit more pay to Donna for maternity coverage.

3

In general, users care more about quality support than upper management usually understands. ShapeShift is nothing without its users. IMO, not having a designated support team would be a massive oversight. Support shouldn’t be an afterthought or a side job of another team.

The current Ops budget has cost the DAO $330,000 over 6 months (~$55,000/month) - this is no small number. Even with $55k a month and a team that is swamped with work, you are claiming that the only downside with Ops taking over support is slower response times. It is tough to imagine that the same level of support will be offered by a team that will offer customer support on the side, since other responsibilities will be simultaneously taken care of by your team.

As you mentioned, ticket count has gone down about 50%. In the past year, we have let go of multiple Support workstream members and have consistently lowered our budget. This time around we are proposing just 2 full time support members and 2 part time members… With a 48% budget decrease to match the decrease in tickets. It is worth mentioning; Discord tickets (which have been on the rise) can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 hours +. As we continue to phase out Zendesk and move to a live chat style of support, encounters with our users can eat up a lot of time.

4

I think it’s also important to note: who is the current support team. Trusted, vetted, knowledgeable team members. The Ops team is also made up of awesome, trusted, vetted team members, however the time dedicated to supporting users should not be understated. I’d love to see the community continue to support a dedicated support team. I believe it’s been one of the most consistent and strong parts of ShapeShift since the early days. To echo @mogie the Ops team already has fulltime roles, so I’m not sure where the extra time will come from. Will there be OT for the Ops team? Will that be an additional expense? What happens if lagged support begins effecting the UX? For such a small budget (comparable to the past and other workstream budgets, I can’t see how the community won’t support a dedicated team, especially of this caliber and with this product knowledge).

5

As @slope game pointed out, the total number of tickets sold has decreased by around half. During the course of the previous year, we have reduced our spending significantly and let go of a number of employees of the Support workstream. This time around, we are just asking to have two support members who are full time and two people who are part time. With a 48% fall in the budget to match the decrease in the number of tickets sold.

6

hi, not sure i understand what your saying. you in the correct dao?