SUMMARY:
Sunset the current Support Workstream and transfer all customer support, ticket, and helpdesk responsibilities into the Operations Workstream.
ABSTRACT:
The intention of this proposal continues the spirit of many other posts like: An open letter on strategy and execution - #22 by willy
[SCP-81] Enable Partial Salaries in FOX
Title: [SCP-81] Enable Partial Salaries in FOX Summary: Allow workstream contributors to elect to receive part of their salaries in FOX through Hedgey time-lock bonds. Abstract: If passed, this proposal would allow each workstream contributor to choose from the options listed in the Specification section for a portion of their monthly contribution compensation to be paid in FOX tokens. Contributors would select a percentage of pay in FOX, along with a time-lock period. This would result in …
Optimizing the Goals and Aims of the Growth and Marketing Workstream: A Discussion
Hey - I do not think that people (including me) did not voice concerns over the size of the budget due to a lack of opportunity. I think the workstream leaders followed the governance procedure to a T. My lack in doing so can only be pinned on me.
As an additional attempt to address accountability and justifiable budgets with the focus of optimization, adaptability, and being agile to meet the current needs of the DAO and its product suite, There needs to be a new discovery of the ‘floor’ of need in many areas of our DAO to remain lean and survive the bear market.
Budget cuts and austerity measures are being enacted throughout all of crypto, and while being considered on an individual workstream level amongst leadership in the DAO, the current cuts have fallen somewhat short of the material changes needed to dramatically change the monthly spend and our runway. After careful consideration of the metrics, procedures and current responsibilities of the Support Workstream, and in relation to the current need for support in the DAO with our product suite, I saw the possibility for presenting a different opportunity or solution that takes a more dramatic approach to reducing the monthly stablecoin spend now.
The action required for this savings would be transitioning the Support Workstream and their allocated monthly budget, and a migration of responsibilities to the Operations Workstream as soon as possible for no additional monthly spend.
MOTIVATION:
The DAO’s product suite is still developing towards product market fit in a downward bear market. There are measures already being enacted in hiring freezes, deferred boosted FOX salary payments, and dramatic budget reductions to lower our monthly stablecoin spend. I took a harder look at the considerable amount of spend thoughtout the DAO, and felt with some creative thinking, realignment, and simplification the tasks allocated to the spend as budgeted in the following Support Workstream proposal could be handled for considerably less: Boardroom
A review of the services offered, weekly tickets fielded, and budget allocated highlights a divergence of utility and function the previous centralized ShapeShift Customer Support Department has on the current DAO and its product suite. This issue seemed extremely dire before the announced budget cuts ($46,500/month), and still is incongruent with current and future needs. After budget cuts, $27,965/month is budgeted through the end of the 2022 calendar year. This equates to $167,790 through the end of this approved proposal (July-December 2022). Looking at the metrics of the tickets being processed by this team, provides some insights in declining traffic yet consistent high spends that does not seem to reflect the current support needs of the DAO.
Some key highlights on Support ticket analysis:
Average % decrease in Support tickets since September:
1 Month: 12.93% Decrease
2 Months: 26.23% Decrease
3 Months: 37.80% Decrease
4 Months: 46.73% Decrease
This Week % down from 9/20: 75.80%
Average count per week since Jan 1 2022: 181.5
Average Ticket Count per week since Jan 1 2022/Customer Support Workstream Current Budget: $154.08 (Current average cost per support ticket)
Average Ticket Count per week since Jan 1 2022/1 dedicated Ops Assistant: $28.93 (This proposals’ future average cost per support ticket)
The data shows that the majority of the tickets and issues the support team focuses on are not central DAO products, and are being removed from our support structure (Portis, Coincap, beta.shapeshift,com, etc) Whereas, the new app.shapeshift.com service is actually proving our Engineering and Architectural points in our abstraction layers and open source building by leading to a more robust and less prone to breaking product and less support tickets. The % of tickets related to app.shapeshift.com related to the number of tickets still currently being fielded has only crossed 40% of all weekly tickets once. There is still much work to be done here in optimizing and renewing focus for a better understanding of our DAO’s actual customer support needs.
The Operations Workstream is in the last month of funding before they will need to seek another renewal from the community. The third proposal for the Operations Workstream funding will include all responsibilities assumed from this proposal, as well as a >$25k/month budget cut (>33%) from the previously approved Workstream budget. This will decrease the future Operations Workstream budget to under $50k a month.
A side by side comparison of the current Approved Customer Support Budget and the proposed budget to assume all covered responsibilities can be viewed here.
Ops Workstream Budget addendum to cover Support responsibilities through 2022: $47,000
$26,000 in transitional pay for all Support Workstream contributors.
$21,000 in 3 months additional Maternity leave pay for Megan.
$0 - 1 Month Zendesk License before transitioning to Gitbook, can be covered in Operations current discretionary budget and then canceled.
Proposal would save the DAO: $120,790
Operation Workstream additional cuts in next term: At least >$25,500/month, >$127,500 savings through the same time period.
Total DAO savings through January if responsibilities are assumed by Operations in this proposal and Operations new lower budget passes: >$248,290
Zendesk and Help Desk Solutions
Right now, the current Customer Support Help Desk solution is Zendesk. With the Zendesk licenses and the helpdesk manager salary alone, the DAO is currently spending $11,300 per month for the access, management, and updating of our use of Zendesk for its ticketing and help desk functionality.
A look into 20 other comparable services, protocols, and DAOs has been collated here for a point of reference.
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
3 similar DAOs have support budgets that are publicly available and all offer similar support services for ~$4,500/month vs. ShapeShift’s $28,500/month.
Help Desk article generation and maintenance could 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 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 and remove the ticketing system utilized by Zendesk and remove 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 and very minimal training (if any) will be required to maintain the same level of quality support ShapeShift users are accustomed to. Check out the 3 week transitional plan outlined here.
The support team brought a lot of value when ShapeShift was centralized. Operations thanks them for the hard work they’ve done to help us get where we are. Today, we need to be honest with the current needs of the DAO and sometimes hard decisions need to be made. This proposal allows a save of almost a quarter of a Million dollars across current monthly budgets for Operations and Support while also optimizing our focus and offerings to match our current users needs. This proposal includes a 1 month payment for all contributors beyond the July current salaries, and an additional 3 months of Maternity leave to honor the spirit of the maternity leave that was passed in the original Support proposal.
SPECIFICATION:
Sunset 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 transition pay to all support workstream contributors
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.
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.
BENEFITS: This proposal will save the DAO up to $248,290 over the current passed proposals in the next 6 months while still providing the help and support our users need and with no disruption to current Operations responsibilities.
DRAWBACKS: Support transition may result in temporarily increased ticket response time, and will result in the removal of positions and budget for all DAO contributors in the current Support workstream.
WHAT EXACTLY DOES THIS PROPOSAL DO?:
Save the DAO in excess of $248,290 as a result of the Operations Workstream taking over support for the ShapeShift DAO and consequently dissolving the current Support Workstream.
YES: I am voting for the DAO to transition all Support responsibilities to the Operations Workstream with the passing of this proposal.
NO: Do nothing. I am comfortable with the current spend, budget, and responsibilities as outlined by the Customer Support workstream.
FOX Governance Process How to link legacy forum history to your Metaforo account Anonymous Feedback Submission Form About the 🌊 Workstream Discussion category
Could the users who voted no please explain why and what their counter to the proposal would be?
Thanks for posting. I appreciate you trying to save the DAO some money during these bearish times. I have some questions that I do not think have been addressed in this forum post.
“The data shows that the majority of the tickets and issues the support team focuses on are not central DAO products” - Per the most recent weekly CS reporting from June 20-26: 41.67% of support tickets were regarding app.shapeshift.com (a central DAO product). Also the process to track what each issue is about will need a new system (one is already built into Zendesk).
I think the gitbook wiki looks great and it definitely makes sense to continue adding help desk articles to more decentralized platforms (notion,lobby,gitbook,etc.). Maybe multiple translations can be added to gitbook, like what is being done on Lobby.
I just wanted to start the convo, and am curious to see what other community members think about your ideas. I will be accepting of whatever the community decides.
UPSIDE: Add 2-3 weeks of runway for the DAO.
DOWNSIDE: Cut a workstream that has provided consistent services to the DAO and has shown to be very agile in learning and changing with the product/services we provide.
TLDR: Is ending an entire workstream with a proven track record to add ~3 weeks of runway worth it? After our recent cuts, and our continued monitoring of changes needed as the year goes on…I believe we can continue to evolve with the environment to meet the DAO’s needs while also providing all star support.
I will say, that in its current form I am one of the ‘no’ voters. Beyond the topic of maternity leave/part-time work & comp. agreement being changed for Meg mid-way through the agreed upon terms being ethically incorrect in my eyes – I am having trouble with specific items of coverage involving support/operations and growth likely being considered worth less in terms of priority. The implications of this proposal in its current form (as far as I can interpret now) would directly provide for an increased workload on M, G, & G without Mogie in place, or of course, less coverage on items including but not limited to Lobby (support articles in a number of languages currently unsupported), Zendesk, and Youtube (support videos). I’d be happy to work with Support and Operations to find a solution to said possible reassignment of current (and in progress) work to maintain vital (IMO) partnership agreements/relationships, while also improving various spots of pain in our SEO strategy that directly involve support in my eyes (Youtube optimization on the old, official YT account).
Hi Mogie,
mogie:
Thanks for asking some questions, I hope I can answer them sufficiently for you.
This proposal has been in the works for some time now, and Operations working with Meg to DAO the support responsibilities down to a more appropriate level was offered as an option to Meg by Tyler privately before Marc left in March as well as when he did leave before the most recent passed proposal as a efficient and cost effective way to continue support in a more scaled down manner that still meets the needs of the DAOs users.
mogie:
The research for this proposal in earnest was started at the end of March and presented to Megan April 7th. In response she made the post: Update to Customer Support Workstream Proposal Budget
And cut the Support spend from: $45,600, to $28,500 a cost savings of $17,100, or $102,600 added to the runway over the same period of time.
When this information was presented to Leadership, the total savings of the proposal was over $350,000 for the DAO over the same period of time for the condensing of responsibilities and roles under one workstream. This proposal was delayed numerous times due to Megan’s availability. These delays resulted in further potential savings that could have been offered to the community, but were held back out of respect for Megan attempting to address the incongruent spend herself. There is no evidence that without my initiative and finally going to Megan with an actionable plan that these budget cuts would have ever been considered.
Measuring any individual cuts that have been previously enacted against the runway diminishes the value they actually offer when combined with other cuts and when sustained across long periods of time. I believe that every decrease in the stable spend is worth highly considering in this bear market,. The ~$350,000 (Support passed budget + Ops reductions) savings would be getting closer to a month of runway extension. It also is a massive monthly stable spend decrease that does not affect our FOX emissions in the process, and is the most dramatic savings option that currently has been presented to the DAO for governance.
There have been and will continue to be disruptions to workstreams in the DAO until our spend and revenue reach more of an equilibrium. We aren’t in a position where we have the ability to so clearly map a complete workstream’s responsibilities into another workstream as we do here. The skillset, resources, and available personnel needed to man the current support needs are available in the Operations Workstream to the DAO at a much lower price than currently offered by your workstream. At the end of the day that’s what I’m offering to the community, as close to the same service as possible for much less. Disruption will ultimately come in the form of no longer being able to fund and pay any workstreams if the spend isn’t dramatically addressed.
Operations has outlined a more appropriate support offering based on market research and simplification of services offered and can do so at the cost of 1 Operations Assistant manning support requests (while also regression testing) and round robining that responsibility with a back up/alternate each day/shift. Does it require a sunsetting of a passed proposal to do so? Yes. There is an offering of a month of transitional pay and an honoring of 3 months of Maternity leave to honor the spirit of the proposal and the hard work put in by the workstream contributors. I believe that the value offered to the DAO in this proposal is worth it.
ShapeShift DAO Operations Assistants are spreadsheet wizards and are able to wrangle data pretty efficiently and systematically. All tickets will be logged in DIscord and simple weekly reports will be drawn to measure key metrics around response time, growth, time allotted to support/Operations responsibilities. They will be shared publicly in Ops Sprints, tracked publically in notion, and shared openly on calls that could address resolutions around the insights presented in Unsolved User Problems, Github Backlog Grooming, and Daily releases with Engineering and Product.
mogie:
100% confident. Tshifty and myself have previous scaling experience in ShapeShift Customer Support to the tune of handling >1500 tickets in a single day, far above our 3 month average of flow. While I acknowledge there are lots of tools that could be taken advantage of in Zendesk for macros that are not as readily available in discord, I feel like always being prepared for the next bull run in support is a luxury that should be scrutinized in a bear market that is forecast to go as long as or twice as long as our current projected runway.
mogie:
When and if the insights measured on support stats express that the needs for scaling are required. We have various tools in terms of batching, auto replies, threads, announcements that all have scaling strategies that could be exercised before revisiting a lowest tier of zendesk as a paid option to resolve the issue of too many tickets.
Gitbook is something we already have been using in the engineering side, it runs completely off of our docs repo in github and would additionally be available to any and all developers and anyone who runs our repos locally or is poking around our github. It’s not really a decentralized platform like Lobby, but could be used more efficiently like we do notion. I am not aware of multiple translations for gitbook but I imagine it is something that would live more at the github level.
Thanks for asking the questions you did I hope I was able to provide some more context to the motivation behind this proposal.
There was a comment in the Lunch AMA from I’d like to also address that the budget comparisons were slightly misleading as the Operations Workstream coverage is a budget that is already approved. The proposal has the Support workstream opposite a whole bunch of 0s as these services could be covered at no additional cost. The responsibilities are currently outlined to be covered by 1-2 Operations Assistants per day in a buddy system. Operations Assistants are currently being paid $5250/month for all the tasks they complete, this would be an additional task. At that rate we would be looking at a Customer Support monthly cost closer to $5250-$10500 a month. (>$5250 means our buddy system didn’t work and we are dedicated 2 agents per day to the ticket load exclusively)
That would put the monthly cost for Customer Support at the $28,500 for what was just presented in cuts, or $5-10K in what is currently being proposed.
Thanks for addressing my point. Taking the support budget and just adding $0’s next to it for operations is not accurate. Operations’ is current budget is over $75k/month (3x the cost of support) [SCP-59] - Proposal to fund the Operations Workstream for a second term
You say a new proposal is coming from ops that reduces it under $50k/mo, but how? That should be represented here to give a whole picture. The cost reductions do seem substantial in this proposal but the costs are shifted from one workstream to another, not $0. You’ve raised some good points where other crypto projects finding support for much less per month, and further austerity is welcome.
ZenDesk is the industry standard for support and it is working well for ShapeShift, so far, and offers a lot of features that are beneficial. The SEO value from our ZenDesk articles could be worth the spend of $750/month.
Operations has our own renewal coming up that will be hitting the forums in a week or so. I felt it would not be appropriate or fair to combine the renewal and this proposal as they are two very different asks of governance.
Marley:
I have not had the conversations with all of my team members specifically around potential FOX bonuses, which is the last step I need before I have complete numbers to share with the community around our own reductions in a renewal proposal.
I agree that it is harder to believe these reductions without seeing them as line items. I will work with the rest of Operations on the last numbers I need to provide our future potential budget. I will follow up with those numbers here once they are available.
If Zendesk is preferred to be kept by the community due to the SEO or for any other reason, it absolutely can be maintained for less than $750 a month with optimized account access, and can easily be part of this proposal in a transition of responsibilities to Operations.
During the bull run I wrote a macro explaining the issue because users deposits (ETH-ERC-20) were not being detected. Sure, I didn’t write a personal message to each user nor did I answer everyone of those emails but my macro was used for them.
I think the point given here if there was a rampant amount of tickets and the crypto market made a rebound, we can always scale up agents and change the way we handle support. At this time we do not need the centralized ShapeShift support system and a new scope wev’ve given is in line with most DAO’s that we looked into.
You all do a fantastic job and we’re not disputing that. We’re disputing if this level of service is required for a wallet dashboard DAO when comparing to other DAO’s out there. Zendesk is great for mass of tickets, macro, chat bot learning machines. At this stage in the DAO I would say no.
Gitbook has ways of setting up SEO and it’s already a service we pay for. SEO - GitBook Documentation
As workstream leader for Customer Support, I’d like to just say there are several inaccuracies stated above, but most are at the expense of my character and not related to the successful 6 months we’ve had as a decentralized team. I am proud of what I have accomplished/what my team and I are accomplishing at ShapeShift.
Nothing is more invigorating than being apart of an organization that allows for such community discourse, whether in poor taste or not. I respect what’s being built here, and for that reason, I will spare the he said/she said style of debate.
In essence, the new Ops Proposal is a proposal that could get the job done. Do I believe it would be at the level of excellence my team could execute? No, of course not. The Ops team is full of talent, but they also have full plates. But maybe that’s ok at this stage of our product offerings (and this pesky bear market). This proposal offers a very bare bones support service that will simply include managing a ticket queue. To be clear, my team has managed more than just the ticket queue. We have bolstered reviews, built a hefty Helpdesk, managed that Helpdesk, created trainings, a quality assurance system, videos, built weekly and monthly reports of customer support interactions and contributed to the overall direction of the DAO through governance and community events. I am proud of the work my team does.
If the community supports this direction, I am happy to transition. I will be a big supporter of the ShapeShift DAO whether I “work” here or not. I look forward to seeing this project succeed. There will never be a shortage of obstacles as we roll full steam ahead, and that’s what builds strength.
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