Simple Ways to Add After-Hours Support

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Transcript

Priscilla: 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help. A podcast about customer support from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Priscilla Brooke. Today we're talking about after-hours support coverage. We'll chat in-depth about after-hours support, whether it's important for you to offer, how to make the transition into after-hours coverage and some tips on expanding your coverage as a team. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. As always, we are joined by our podcast producer, Jordan. Hi.

Priscilla: 0:27

A couple episodes ago we had Kevin Finn on to talk about the evolution of Buzzsprout support and during that conversation we talked for a quick second about After Hours support and how we started expanding our coverage into After Hours support. So I thought it was a great time for us to kind of have a full episode to talk about this, to dive into some of our thought processes when we moved from standard working hour support into after hour support and then what that looked like and some tips that we might have for other small support teams that are looking to expand that coverage. Before we get into that, we do have a special guest. Cara Pacetti is joining us today. She is one of the newer additions to the Buzzsprout support team. She joined us about a year ago and she, like, hit the ground running and has quickly become a huge part of our team.

Priscilla: 1:17

She has a background working in education and administration, but everything she does, I think, kind of revolves around her love for people, and that's like such a good quality to have when you're working in support. We've talked about it a bunch, but she just loves people. Her job description in her email signature is literal ray of sunshine, which is when she starts talking. You will understand. It is so, Cara, like she is a literal ray of sunshine, and so it's just so much fun. All of our customers see that through her emails, just how positive and uplifting she is, and so she has had the opportunity to do a lot of after hours support for us over the last year, and so I thought she'd be a really great person to come in and talk with us about this, since she has a ton of firsthand experience working after hours. So thanks for being here, Cara.

Cara: 2:05

Well, thank you. Wow, that was quite an intro and I'm flattered. I'm happy to be here.

Jordan: 2:13

I'm really excited. I feel like our listeners are going to have a little bit of an understanding of who you are, because I think this is the third time we've mentioned you on this podcast.

Priscilla: 2:21

That's probably true, Like in different episodes.

Jordan: 2:24

So I think it's yeah, I think it's true, and so you know, our listeners finally get to know you a little bit.

Cara: 2:30

I'm so excited and, like Priscilla said, I do love people and I love our podcasters and are happy to help listeners.

Priscilla: 2:35

So I'm excited. Yeah, all right, before we jump in, I want to float a question. So at the end of every episode here on Happy to Help, we usually sign off with go and make someone's day, and the idea behind that is that, you know, in support we have the ability to make someone's day better, and so we kind of want that to be an encouragement. You know, go into your work recognizing that you have a pretty cool opportunity to make someone's day better, and so I thought it'd be cool to ask Cara to share a time, maybe in the last week, that someone's made your day.

Cara: 3:07

I think that's a great idea. I actually have a really good example of this. So we recently moved and we did not have a mailbox because, as Priscilla knows, where I live, we can't have mailboxes outside. We have to have, like, a lockbox at the end of our road, and so the post office has to install that. So here we are, we're moved into our new home. We requested them to add a lockbox and it was taking months and it was just a delay on their side, not quite sure what was going on, but I ended up stopping a gentleman at the lockboxes and his name was Joe and he works for USPS. And his name was Joe and he works for USPS.

Jordan: 3:49

He took complete ownership of my request and worked on it for months.

Cara: 3:51

Like he would call me with updates and I was. I mean, no one asked him to do that. That is not in his job description to like make sure you know. He actually wasn't even a full-time USPS employee. He just was brought in to help and at one point he called me and goes it's still not done. But I just wanted to leave you with one last update because I'm no longer going to be there and was like giving me an update. And then recently this week he called and was like I'm back and we got it and it's being installed.

Jordan: 4:16

And now it is.

Cara: 4:17

That's amazing. But the fact that he took such ownership in getting this mailbox and it was completely just his like own ambition, like his own it wasn't. For me, it was just because that was the job, that he was given the task, and he just wanted to see it through, and that just totally made my day. I mean, I just thought that was so cool and like what cool work ethic and I don't know. Yeah, so go, joe, so happy, that's great. And now I have a box. That's such a good story. It was awesome.

Priscilla: 4:46

I love that. Well, thanks for sharing that, Cara. I think you know it's really fun to focus on the positive things, and so I encourage anyone who is listening, if you think of like a story on your end where someone made your day, text the show and let us know a little bit about that story, and then maybe I'll share them on future episodes and encourage all of us to be that positivity to other people too. So let's jump into it. After hours support people who are listening to this, some of you might be pumped about it already offering after hours support, and this is really exciting for you. And then I'm sure there are some people who are listening to this and are overwhelmed just by the idea of trying to offer support outside of regular working hours.

Priscilla: 5:27

The good news is that after-hours support does not have to be overwhelming. It can be a small change or a series of small changes that have a big impact on your customers, and so you know, I thought we'd talk about today where we were when we started moving into after-hours support, and then some tips for people who are considering that transition and how to make those after-hours the most effective that they can be. So first I want to kind of clarify what I'm talking about. When I'm saying after-hours support, I'm not talking about providing support 24-7. I'm not talking about someone always being available around the clock type of a thing. It's more the idea of having the ability to get in touch with someone outside of traditional working hours, and so in the US traditionally that's around 8 am to 5.30 pm on Monday through Friday. So when I'm talking about after-hours support, I'm really talking about kind of weekend hours and then Saturdays and Sundays.

Jordan: 6:23

Yeah.

Priscilla: 6:24

But not like that 24 hour coverage thing. So as we talk about this, I just want to be in the same context for that. That. I'm not promoting that you hire someone to stay up all night and be working all night.

Priscilla: 6:36

That's not. That's not what we're talking about. So I think the first question to ask yourself when you're trying to decide if you're going to do after hours support is do your customers need it? Is this something that your product needs? One thing Kevin talked about in the episode a couple weeks ago was when we were considering after hours support. One of the reasons we ended up going forward with it was because we have podcasters as our customers, and podcasting is largely a hobby for people, and so a lot of times they're doing it in addition to their working hours, and so that means they're working on it nights and they're working on it during the weekend, and so if we want to be offering remarkable support for our customers, we need to be available when they're working on it, and so that's why it was clear to us that we needed to move into having support coverage during that time. Now you might have a product where people aren't working on it outside of the normal working hours, and so it might not be as imperative that you have someone covering Saturdays and Sundays if people using your product are only using it during working hours. Like if you have a time tracking product and people only track their time during the work week, that kind of a thing.

Priscilla: 7:50

Another thing that we considered when we were thinking through expanding our coverage was this idea of missing a window of opportunity for new customers.

Priscilla: 8:01

So when we didn't have support on Saturday and Sunday, someone would write in on a Saturday morning with a question about the product. They weren't an existing customer and they wanted to learn more, and they wouldn't get a response back until Monday, and so we would see pretty often that we would come in on a Monday morning and there would be emails waiting for us about the product. We would respond and give them the information they need, and then they would respond and say, oh, we already went with someone else, and we saw that pretty often as we were leading up to making this change and that was one of the driving factors was that we felt like we were missing out on some great opportunities when we didn't have anyone covering those hours. So that's another thing to think through. Like, are your potential customers reaching out during those after hours? And if they are, maybe you want to be offering support at that time so that you are capitalizing on that and able to, like get them the help they need so they don't go somewhere else.

Cara: 8:58

We had a podcaster write in one time and it was a test, like that's what they were doing, and they said whoever responds first, or like if we get a response like, that's who we're going with, and so sometimes you know, admittedly that's what they're doing and they're like you guys pass, we're going to go with Buzzsprout. So that was a win.

Priscilla: 9:16

Yeah that's definitely. I feel like that happens when people will be like either they'll say it or they won't say it. Right, and they'll write in and they'll say oh I'm curious about this, I've also emailed two of your competitors. First person to get back to me wins my business and you know it makes it kind of fun. Then you can kind of have fun with that response. But yeah, definitely there are people that will kind of, as they're weighing competitors support is a big factor.

Jordan: 9:39

I mean, that's probably where a little bit of like market research comes in too. Is you know, when are your competitors doing support, like, what are their support hours? Are they doing 24, seven? Yeah, are they, you know, doing telephone service, things like that? So that could also help you in determining if you want to, you know, go a little bit above them.

Priscilla: 9:58

Yeah, I think it's an interesting aspect of it, like looking at your competition to decide what you're going to do. I think you kind of want to weigh it a little bit. You know, it's good to know what your competition is offering and let that be a factor in your decision making, maybe, but not drive it, because I think sometimes you'll look at people and you'll say, oh, they're doing chat support, I have to do chat support, but sometimes chat support isn't the answer, and so you really do need to kind of think about what you value, what's important to you, how you want to do it. And knowing the competition, the landscape, that's really good, but I don't know if that should be a driving force. But it's definitely good to know what's going on with your competition and whether they're available or not. And if everyone is providing after-hours support, then you probably do want to be available as well, or else you might end up losing customers to competition, and that kind of goes into this idea of your existing customers running into roadblocks during the weekend.

Priscilla: 10:54

One of the things that we find now that we're doing after-hours and weekend support that's really been a huge benefit to our podcasters, our customers is that when they run into an issue that our podcasters, our customers, is that when they run into an issue that they can't solve on their own, they don't have to wait until Monday to get an answer. Because there's some issues that your customers will run into that they can kind of get around and it's nice to have an answer, but they don't need it. And then there's some issues where they can wait a little while and it doesn't delay their progress, but those emails where they've run into something and they're stuck, they can't move past it. We kind of refer to those as roadblocks. They can't get past that. There's nothing they can do. Having the ability to support those people specifically on the weekends they don't have to wait until Monday is a huge, huge benefit and really will set your product apart, especially if your competition is not providing weekend support. So that's another thing to keep in mind.

Cara: 11:48

And even in addition to the weekend, but the after hours, so the evening hours, if you're a worldwide company. I remember a podcaster wrote in from Australia and I had responded to her email. You know, in normal time working the evening hours, and she's like what, there's somebody there. Oh, this is so nice. Yeah, Well, can you help me. And so that was a cool win, Like yeah, I'm here to help. And she was excited.

Priscilla: 12:12

That's a really good point too is that especially if you have a team like ours that's, for the most part, in the same time zone. We have one person outside of the East Coast time zone, but everyone else really is in the East Coast time zone, and it is really something you don't think about as much as you probably should that you have customers that are outside of your time zone and you want to be sure that you're offering support to them as well, and so you know we have podcasters in Australia, and I would assume I've never been to Australia, I've never lived in Australia, but I would assume that if you live in Australia and you're working with a company based out of the US, you're expecting always at least a 24-hour turnaround, at a bare minimum, and so being able to give those people a quick turnaround because you have evening support or early morning support, I think that can be a huge benefit as well to your podcasters and make them feel really valued and cared for. Like that woman who wrote in from Australia, she probably felt really great because she got a response back from you right away and felt like we cared enough about the people that we have in Australia to make sure that we are offering support late into the evening. So, yeah, I think that's a that's a really good point, Cara. Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Cara. So let's talk a little bit about the transition, then, from regular hours support into after hours support. And so if you didn't listen to that episode with Kevin from a couple weeks ago, I'll give you a quick rundown of kind of where we were when we started considering after hours support.

Priscilla: 13:41

At the time, we had two full-time support specialists on the team. That was it, and we weren't in the process of hiring anyone new, it was just the two of us. But we knew that we wanted to have some kind of a support coverage on weekends, and we weren't really thinking about evenings at first. We were really just thinking about weekends, and so we were trying to figure out how to make small changes that would give us the ability to help those podcasters on the weekends. Our approach to making this work was to use trial and error to not overcommit ourselves before we figured out how we were going to do it, and then to prioritize focused hours of work. So at Buzzsprout, we care deeply about working 40 hours a week, and so it was never a question that we were going to say, ok, now we're just going to work 43 hours a week so that we can have some hours on the weekend. That was never going to be the solution and we weren't hiring anyone new. So we knew we kind of had 40 hours for each of us and we needed to figure out how to make those 40 hours of focused work work for our podcasters as well on the weekends. And so for us we decided, since there were two of us, to take two hours during the week and put them on a weekend day. So one person worked Saturday, one person worked Sunday and we each had two hours to put in that day and we kind of just took them out of a day during the week. So we'd get off at like 430 that day, or whatever our schedule looked like. We'd work two seven hour days, basically. And so that's how we started, just the tiniest change.

Priscilla: 15:13

And you know we tried some different strategies. I think there was one time where Addie was the other person doing support with us at the time and she put in both of her hours in the morning on Sunday so that she'd have the rest of her Sunday off. It was great because she cleared the inbox in the morning, but we found that that didn't work so great, because then the people who wrote in after that first two hours didn't get any responses, didn't have any support for those people later, and so we realized that that wasn't the best strategy. So then maybe we tried checking in every little while and looking for just those roadblock emails and new customers and just focusing on them, and that had benefit because people got really fast responses. But it didn't provide us the ability to truly detach on a weekend, and so we were constantly checking the inbox, constantly feeling like our computers had to be with us, that kind of a thing, and so that really didn't work for us as well, and maybe it was great for the podcaster, but it didn't help us with the balance in our life, and at the time there were just two of us.

Priscilla: 16:16

We were still working a five day work week, and now we were tacking on time on a Saturday or Sunday, and so it really felt like you were losing a Sunday if you were constantly checking the inbox, and so that didn't work out so well, and so what we ended up doing that worked the best for us was we'd put in one hour in the late morning and then one hour in the evening.

Priscilla: 16:38

It was a happy middle. It gave us the ability to answer all those people that came in overnight and in the morning and then jump back in in the evening and answer anyone who had come in during the day. So that meant that some people had to wait a couple hours before they got a response maybe four hours but it allowed us the ability to detach and actually have our weekend, and so trial and error is just really important when you're trying these new things. You're not going to get it perfectly off the bat and so trying to figure out you know, testing different things. For us it was pretty easy because we had a small team so we could be flexible and change things up week to week, and it took us a couple months really to get the swing of things and to start seeing where the benefit really was coming in for our podcasters and then also just for the product itself.

Cara: 17:26

Yeah, you just got to go for it. Gauge the need because you'll know after a couple tries you know if it's a big hit.

Priscilla: 17:32

Yeah, and it's important to check in too. I mean, if you have a small team that's trying to figure out what after-hours support looks like, then checking in after every weekend I mean Addie and I would check in with each other each Monday and say, ok, how was the weekend? Do you feel like you were able to get a full weekend and relax? Do you feel like you were working all weekend? Like having those conversations and checking in is really important when you're doing trial and error.

Priscilla: 17:55

Another thing that we did in the beginning was we didn't tell our customers that we were going to start playing around with after hours support. We just kind of started doing it and so we didn't want to start setting expectations before we knew how we were going to meet them and so don't feel like you have to share that right off the bat. When you're trying to figure out what your after-hours support is going to look like, you can just start doing it and you know it's kind of like the under-promising and over-delivering strategy. You know people were so excited to get weekend support because they were not expecting weekend support. Even now I think on our help form it says something along the lines of fast replies 9 to 530 Eastern and delightfully quick responses all other times, or something like that all other times or something like that, so that there's not this huge expectation that you're going to get a response right away. But you know that you're going to be happy with the response time, no matter when you write in, and so there's no need to over-promise or over-commit to things until you're at a place where you know where you want to be.

Priscilla: 18:58

And so, for us, it took us about three months to figure out that after hours was something that we really wanted to invest in, and that's when we decided to bring another person on the team to kind of help us with covering that, and so that was. Another thing to kind of think through is that you might end up changing the structure of your team. If you go and lean into after hours support, you might see a huge impact on new customers coming to your product. You might find that the general happiness of your customers rises a ton just because they have the ability to get in touch with you over the weekend, and so when that happens, just be open to the possibility you may have to hire more people onto your team to make it sustainable, but testing it out and getting comfortable with it in the first place. Those small steps can be done with a small team, and so there's no need to start big, hire new people before you even have decided whether that's something that you're going to really invest in.

Cara: 19:56

Yeah, I think you guys were talking with Kevin on a Happy to Help episode and he was talking about customer success and how we can be proactive in that. This is one of those ways, even just throwing that weekend support out there, maybe on a minimal basis at first, but it's just an easy way to help proactively instead of react. Yeah, so, yeah, I think that's a great, great point.

Priscilla: 20:18

Yeah, that's very true. Is that this, after our support, definitely falls into that Podcaster success? For us it's podcaster success but customer success. If that's what you're going for with your support team, which you know, hopefully if you're listening to this podcast, then you do care a ton about your customer success. So after-hours support is great. So I want to transition a little bit and talk about where we are now with after hours coverage, kind of how that's changed in the last, I guess like four or five years, since we kind of started doing the after hours support, and then give you some tips on things to think about when you're dipping your toe into that.

Priscilla: 20:58

Where we are right now, we have weekend support. We also offer evening support now, and so the way that works is that the people who are not on weekend support are assigned one evening a week so that we can cover every evening during the week, and that allows our podcasters like we were talking about our podcaster in Australia it allows them the ability to get in touch with us after hours on the weekdays, and so basically, the way we do that is that you have two hours to put in during the evening and you can figure out where you want to put those in as long as they happen during the evening hours, and so that's how we do it now and it works pretty well for us. It allows us the ability to give support to our customers who really need it, but it isn't so much coverage that we feel like we're losing our ability to check out and unwind and not be connected to work 24-7. And so it's a good balance for us. I just wanted to give you a little bit of that context to where we are now All right, so some tips that I want to talk through on running effective after hours support coverage.

Priscilla: 22:04

The first one is to be transparent during hiring.

Priscilla: 22:07

So if you are looking to expand into after hours coverage, or if you're already doing after hours coverage, like we are, when you're hiring new people on your team, there is nothing more important than making sure that they understand that they're going to be expected to do some after hours coverage.

Priscilla: 22:25

You know there's nothing worse than getting someone that you're really excited about on the team and then telling them OK, you're going to be working Saturdays for these months and hearing, oh no, I can't do that, that's not going to work with my schedule, and then having to make the decision of well, are they a hire now that we can continue working with, or is this not going to work because of the scheduling? And so we try to be very, very, very intentional about being transparent with our new hires about what hours are going to be looking like for them and what's expected for many new hires. I mean, Cara, when you were hired, I think you and I had a full I don't know, I wouldn't call it an interview but we had a separate conversation that was just about hours, because I was nervous that I wasn't being clear enough that hey, you're going to be working weekends, you're going to be working some nights, and I want to make sure that you're fully on board with that before we continue moving down this road 100%.

Cara: 23:22

I remember from the other side, the interviewee yeah, I heard weekends and I looked at my husband and he went uh, so I think I asked Priscilla a lot and so that's just something to consider. You know, be completely honest with the person you're hiring and give them time to process it. Like that's a hard interview question, just to say this is it Cause they might need to kind of look at their schedule and just really put themselves in that? Like that's what I did. I'm like, okay, I need to really does this really fit? And then they can come back and you can have a little more confidence with the hiring because you know, all right, they they're ready, they, they know what is expected and they're on board. And so, yeah, that was a big part, yeah.

Priscilla: 24:02

Well, and one thing to keep in mind too you know, when Cara came to us she came from working at a school and so she was working a pretty I mean pretty traditional hours, maybe a little bit skewed earlier, but you know, monday through Friday, there was no question of working on the weekends. If you're hiring someone who's coming from a nontraditional support background, then being really upfront about those hours is really important because it's going to be different than what they're used to. But you might be hiring someone that has history or experience working those crazy kind of after hours support. For example, brian, who we had on an episode earlier. He came to us from Chick-fil-A.

Priscilla: 24:42

We had on an episode earlier. He came to us from Chick-fil-A and when I told him about the hours and had that conversation with him about the hours, he was like oh, that's great, because I usually start at 4 am with Chick-fil-A, so I'm happy to not start at 4 am and to just work a couple hours on a Saturday, and so you know it's just. You might have people that it's not new and it's not going to be a difficult transition, and then you might have people that really need to consider if that's going to work for their lifestyle, because if it doesn't work for them, the likelihood that they're going to burn out quickly is high, and so you just want to make sure that everyone is aware of what's going on and what's expected of them as they're going into that job. All right, the second tip I had is to get new hires comfortable with after-hour coverage early, throw it to the wolves.

Jordan: 25:31

Exactly.

Priscilla: 25:32

So at some point we're going to have an episode about training and how we do training here, but I kind of want to touch on it a minute just because it has this crossover with after hours, because our after hours strategy is so tied up in our training strategy too. But typically when we have someone new come onto the team they go through a training process and when they're done with that they immediately get put on Saturday or Sunday support and that can be scary. Usually they've been on the team for at least six weeks at that point. So they're pretty comfortable with working in the inbox and solo and they're familiar with our tone and they know our communication goals and all of that is pretty good. But they're still kind of finding their legs and so putting them on Saturday support can feel a little nerve wracking.

Priscilla: 26:19

Cara laughing Intimidating, yeah, but it's so, so, so good because it is such a good way to learn. When you are the person responsible for the inbox. It builds that confidence in you and that problem-solving muscle and that's such a big part of having remarkable support is working with someone who has that drive to figure out what the problem is. If you don't have that drive, then it's going to be really hard for you to enjoy this work. And so putting someone on weekend support, where they're more or less on their own, forces them to figure out if that problem solving is going to be something that they enjoy or if it's going to be something that they just have a really hard time with. And so we always that's kind of like. In that first couple months you end up on weekend support. So, Cara, let me ask you a question. You started about a year ago and you went through the training and then you immediately went to Saturday support coverage. How did you feel in that first month or so of doing Saturday support?

Cara: 27:24

Okay, well, first shift terrified, but also I did feel prepared. I joke about being thrown to the wolves, I mean I definitely felt like I was given enough information, I knew the expectations and I also knew that Priscilla was just one phone call away if I were to get stuck. And here at Buzzsprout we always operate from a place of calm and so you know, no issue, it can all be handled, it can all be sorted, you know. And so just to kind of remember that and keep that in perspective.

Cara: 27:57

But speaking to what you were saying about problem solving, like just imagine getting like enough information to be effective and then getting to use that skill right away and like just putting that muscle into work and like figuring it out, and someone who's like competitive or like driven it was not draining for me, it was life-giving because it was yeah, I was able to like a question would come in I'm like, oh gosh, okay, I remember seeing that and I mean I'm a little bit old school and have my notes that I wrote down.

Cara: 28:26

But, either way, there's so many resources and it was just fun to problem solve and to kind of know, like when I report back to Priscilla, or when she comes and checks on the inbox at the end of this day, like she sees the work that I put in. Yeah, you're at the beginning and maybe you're doing it more for your supervisor and you're new and you're want to impress, but it carries over, because even now when podcasters write in it's for them. I'm like, okay, I don't know the answer to this, but let me, let me figure this out for you. Well, let's get this together and we'll figure this out and it just it's very life-giving and something about being independent and just owning the inbox. Like this is my responsibility, this is on me, Let me do it. And it's just such a good training method. But when she told me that I'd be going to Saturdays in my first six weeks. I'm like what?

Priscilla: 29:13

It definitely can feel like you're being thrown to the wolves, and so we try to set it up in a way that you know that there's that lifeline. I'm always going to be available during those first several Saturdays and so you're never going to really be on your own. But it does kind of push you to lean into that problem solving, into that independence, into that manager of one that we were talking about with Marshall. It really grows that muscle and strengthens that part of what we care so much about with new people on the team and with everyone on the team. So, without getting too much more into the training side of things, that is part of how our after hours works is a lot of times the person who's just started will end up doing some of those after hours, and then it really sets the tone for what their expectations are going forward and what kind of after hours they're going to be offering.

Priscilla: 30:05

All right, so tip number three is to share the load between the team. One of the great things about a support team is that everyone leans on each other and we have this shared camaraderie. When you have that, you're able to offer better support for people because you're able to lean on each other and bring in different expertise, and so part of that applies to these after hours support as well. When we were first looking to hire a person on the team that was going to help with after hours support, we had a lot of conversations about what their schedule would look like and whether they would do all the after hours support and Addie and I would stay on regular hours, or if it would be shared more between the three of us, and ultimately we found that when you share the load between everyone, it helps bring the team together and it feels a lot more manageable than if you have one person who's doing, you know, every night and Saturdays and Sundays One.

Priscilla: 31:05

It makes their quality of life worse because they're working on all of these weird hours, and it also disjoints them from the team because they're not working at the same time that the rest of the team is working. And so we have found a kind of rotation method works really well for our team and so for us. What that looks like is we do kind of a quarterly rotation situation, so every three months we rotate who's working the weekends, we rotate who's working evenings, and that allows us to have this shared carrying of the load and it also helps not feel like the bottom of the totem pole are the people that do weekend support, because you don't want that to feel like that's the like bottom of the barrel hours. You know the weekend support. In some ways it can be really beneficial to work weekend support because you get Fridays off and then you have your Friday to get all your work done, and you also get some time on Saturdays to get work done too because of the way we structure those days.

Jordan: 32:05

How did you land on quarterly?

Priscilla: 32:08

So for a while the way we did it was we would put the new hire on a weekend day and they'd kind of stay there until we needed to shift the schedule. For you know, someone on the team's schedule changed and it was a little bit flowy and it changed when it needed to change. But there was no real structure there and we found that in some cases what would happen is that person would be working a Saturday for six to eight months and it was really difficult on them and they were just taking it and we would kind of miss that. It was difficult on them and it just, you know, kind of over time it becomes harder and harder and so we found that really three months is a good amount of time. It feels doable.

Priscilla: 32:47

If you're put on a Saturday to work on a Saturday, you don't feel like you're doing it for the entire year, you don't feel like it's this long. Nice to be able to see okay, this will be done in three months. If I am not loving working, you know, tuesday nights that's, I know that it's only for three months and so I can kind of work around, that it just helps they're I don't know they're easier to chew if they're three month pieces.

Jordan: 33:16

And it's probably also easier on the person making the schedule if they don't have to change it like every week or every month. You know the schedule. If they don't have to change it like every week or every month, you know.

Priscilla: 33:24

Like it's, but and there's also, you know it doesn't offer any consistency if it's changing every week or every month. Oh yeah, Because you can't plan in advance. If you know if you want to take a vacation in August and you're not sure are you going to be working Saturdays in August, or are you going to be working Sundays, or are you going to be working a Tuesday night, it just makes it really difficult to know. And so, yeah, having three months really gives us the ability to balance that structure without having these like prolonged commitments of after hours for one single person.

Cara: 33:56

And another thing regarding the schedule is usually you like to have somebody who isn't assigned a Saturday. That is kind of that filler Like a lot of times it ends up being you, Priscilla but kind of have that person that like, okay, you can cover if a Saturday is needed to take off, Because it's harder to fill a Saturday when there's only one person working. So that's something to keep in mind for people making that transition into weekend support when they're starting out.

Priscilla: 34:21

Yeah Well, and it's good too to think about. Sometimes, when I'm talking to people about what weekend support looks like, they'll say does that mean I can never take a Saturday off because I'm working Saturdays? Does that mean that I can't take PTO on those days? And that's not the case. You can take PTO on a Saturday just like you would on a Monday. Now, if you put PTO every Saturday for your three-month quarter, that would not be great, but you could take PTO on a Saturday just like you would on any other day.

Priscilla: 34:50

We, just like Cara was saying, we have typically it's me or we have someone else on the team whose role moves around to fill in those gaps when PTO is taken, and so that helps us to cover that weekend support.

Priscilla: 35:05

Pto is taken and so that helps us to cover that weekend support. That kind of ties into my next point, which is to lead by example. As a leader of a team that is doing after hours support, it is important that you are also doing after hours support. I think there's probably it's very frustrating to be on a team where you're working on Saturdays or you're working in the evenings and you know the senior members of the team or the leaders on the team aren't doing after hours support. It can be very frustrating, can make you feel like these hours aren't important because I'm doing them and the leaders aren't doing them, and so I would recommend, if you're doing after hours support for support for your support team as the leader, make sure that you are also covering some after-hours support, and so that could look like doing an evening during the week, but it could also look like being available to cover Saturdays when people take PTO, or being available being the on-call person when you have a trainee who's working on a Saturday.

Cara: 36:02

Right, absolutely.

Priscilla: 36:03

I agree, all right. So the next tip is to communicate your after hours goals well to your team. This one is really important because you're not going to be the one always doing the after hours support, and so you need to make sure that the whole team is unified on what the goals are for those hours. And so that comes back to why did you add them in the first place? Why did you expand to after hours coverage in the first place? So for us, we expanded because we wanted to make sure that we were getting back to those potential customers without making them wait until Monday, and we wanted to make sure we could clear the roadblocks for our existing podcasters when they wrote to us and we're stuck and we didn't want to delay their work. And so those are the two biggest parts of after hours support.

Priscilla: 36:49

And so when we're talking about what those goals are as a team, it's really important to make sure that everyone who's doing any kind of after hours support understands that the goal is not a clear inbox. The goal is not working straight from 8 am until 10 pm. The goal is to help those two very specific types of customer and then from there, if you have more time that you're supposed to be working. Then you can move on to other, less quote unquote urgent emails. But your goal is not a clear inbox. Your goal is to make sure that the people who need your help are the ones who are getting it on a Saturday and the ones that can wait until Monday because they don't have an urgent question or they're curious about something. But it's not you in as a leader and putting an employee on Saturday job.

Cara: 37:39

You've got to protect your mind. You've got to protect your time and take care of our customers.

Priscilla: 38:07

Yes, but also don't do a disservice to yourself and, as a leader, you do a really good job at reminding and something important to remind your hires about Well, I think that's important too, cara, to keep in mind that when you have someone who's working on a weekend day, that you don't want them to get burned out by overworking that day. You know, I said it up top, but we care a lot about working 40 quality hours a week and not overworking that. And if you had someone who's working on a Saturday who feels that they have to have the inbox clear that is the main goal is to always clear the inbox whenever they're in it You're going to end up working way more hours than the six to eight that you have for that day, and so we try to be really intentional about not overworking on the weekends, because then, if you know that someone else cares about you not overworking, you're much more likely to be open to working on a Saturday when you know that your boss doesn't want you to work more than six hours. In fact, they really don't want you to work more than six hours, and so I think that's helpful to make sure that everyone knows that that's not the goal. The goal is not for Cara to be tied to her computer when she's working on a Saturday or Sunday. The goal is for Cara to be available to our customers who need quick help on a Saturday but not to completely burn out within two weeks because she's working 10-hour days on a Saturday.

Priscilla: 39:30

And then the last thing is to trust your team. You know whether you have one person or five people doing support after hours. You always want to be respectful of their time. We are all about being managers of one at Buzzsprout, and so that applies to our weekend coverage. So when someone is working on a Saturday and they have that certain number of hours that they can put in, they choose when they are going to work those hours. Knowing the goals, knowing the point of the after hours coverage, they can put those hours where they need to put them, based on their own Saturday schedule. You know, within reason Now we've talked about you don't want to put all the hours at the beginning of the day because if you do that then anyone who writes in after you're done doesn't get any help.

Priscilla: 40:16

And so there's finding that balance and trusting your team to find that balance of when am I going to work versus when am I going to detach from the inbox. That's really important and some of that, especially for new hires, will take time to like learn that balance. But once they learn that balance, then as a leader, you really want to step back and trust them to manage that time themselves. Otherwise, they're going to feel like they're being micromanaged on a weekend, and so not only now do they have to work the weekend time themselves, otherwise they're going to feel like they're being micromanaged on a weekend, and so not only now do they have to work the weekend by themselves, they're also being told exactly when and how to do everything on the weekend without having the flexibility of saying oh, someone wants to go to brunch, you know what I can do an hour of work now, go to brunch and then come back into the hour, because I have the freedom to do that.

Priscilla: 41:15

No-transcript. After-hours support doesn't have to be super overwhelming, and you don't have to wait until you have a big team to offer after-hours support. So take the time, understand your customers' needs, respect your team members in the process and make small changes, because those small changes can have huge impacts on your customers' happiness, success and loyalty. Success and loyalty it's time for Support in Real Life, our segment where we discuss real support experiences from our listeners. So what do you have for us this week, jordan?

Jordan: 41:48

We have a message from Gwen that says Hello Priscilla. Sometimes we have to deny customer requests and I always feel uncomfortable doing it. What's the best way to say no while still maintaining a positive relationship with the customer?

Priscilla: 42:03

That's a really good question and it's really tough too. Yeah, especially if you work like a service like Buzzsprout for a product that has the ability to have people offer feature requests and send over recommendations and you welcome those. It can be really hard to figure out one if you're going to move forward with a request or not, but then also just how to communicate to a customer whether you are going to do it or not. And if you're not, do you tell them you're going to do it anyway? Do you tell them you're going to pass it on anyway? So it's hard.

Priscilla: 42:35

I think that's a really good question from Gwen. The first thing I would say is be as honest as you can be. People really respect transparency and so if the answer is no, be honest and transparent about that being the answer. I think it builds that relationship.

Priscilla: 42:53

If someone recommends a feature and you know it's never going to happen, to be honest with them and say, hey, I appreciate you requesting this. I can see the need for it. Here's where we stand on it and kind of explaining that, and it's almost like respecting them and treating them as an adult and saying here's why that's not going to happen, here's why we're not focused on that right now. I think having that honesty is really good. There can be something really bad about telling someone you'll pass something along, knowing that it's never going to happen, and then having them check in on it months later and saying, well, where is that thing that I requested? And now you have to tell them, oh, it's not going to happen. But I told you I'd pass it on. But now I'm kind of backed against a wall.

Jordan: 43:34

I think of someone like me who likes to be approved of, and I really require the approval of others. It's so easy for me to slip into that white lie of like, oh that's such a great request, I am totally going to pass that on and you know, we'll add that to the list. And then, yeah, it sometimes does get you in hot water later when they're like hey, did they say anything about that?

Priscilla: 43:59

You're like, oh yikes, no, they didn't.

Priscilla: 44:01

Right, yeah, and then you have to tell them the truth later anyway, so yeah, and then I think another important thing to keep in mind is to identify the root of the problem.

Priscilla: 44:12

So people will often ask for feature requests because they're trying to solve a problem, and so you might not be able to give them the feature request they're asking for, but you might be able to identify what the root of their problem is, that they're trying to solve, and you might come up with different options to solve that.

Priscilla: 44:30

So you might find a really great workaround, or you might find a third party that offers what they're looking for that they can use alongside your service to get a solution to the problem they're running into. And so, part of that transparency, you know you can respond and say, hey, we're not going to move forward with this feature request exactly as you've laid it out right now, but can you tell me a little bit more about what you're trying to accomplish and what roadblock you're running into, and I'd be happy to come up with some other solutions that can solve your problem. That way you're really building that relationship with your customer while saying, no, I'm not going to do this for you, or this isn't something we're going to do. Henry Ford, where he said you know, if I listened to what?

Jordan: 45:22

people wanted I would be building a faster horse, you know, instead of a car.

Priscilla: 45:24

People think that they know exactly how to solve a solution, and part of our role is to actually find the best solution forward, and it might not be the same thing that people are requesting, and so I think it's important to be respectful of people, obviously, who are writing in and requesting feature updates, and so we, as a team, want to be respectful of their opinions, of where they're coming from, of their realities and help them as much as possible, but also be honest with them if it's not something that's going to happen, and not let them throw a feature request into an abyss that never goes anywhere, but instead be honest and transparent about them, whether you're going to pass it on and it might end up somewhere, or if you're not going to pass it on because it's not something that we're going to focus on right now.

Cara: 46:08

And, at the end of the day, as a support team, you're trying to care for your customer and do what's best by them and, unfortunately, if that means that what you're offering doesn't fit their need and that they might need to look elsewhere, it sounds like it's a failure because they you know you may be losing a customer, but at the end of the day, the goal is to support them. So, being honest, that could end up in a good recommendation, like, yeah, buzzsprout wasn't my podcast host, but, man, they sure directed me here and that was really helpful and it's a win, even though you may have lost a customer and they may come back if you add that feature later. So that's just something to consider about. Being honest, don't just try to get somebody to stay by giving a false hope that one day we'll do what they're asking.

Priscilla: 46:51

Yeah, no, I think that's true. I think that's really good. I don't remember, was it? I think it might have been on that episode with Kevin? We talked about how your product isn't necessarily going to be the best fit for every person who needs that solution, and so you might have a customer that says this is a deal breaker for me. I have to have this feature, you guys need to build it, or I'm leaving, and you might say that's not something that we're focused on right now, and so I would be happy to help you find someone who can get you what you need, and it might be a competitor.

Priscilla: 47:23

And if you care about them as a person which we've talked about in our empathy episodes that that's so important when giving remarkable customer support. It might be that you go and you look up some of your competition and you find out who offers that thing they need and help them move to your competition and maybe in the future, when they realize they didn't offers that thing they need, and help them move to your competition. And maybe in the future, when they realize they didn't need that thing and they go. I'd really rather have the support from Buzzsprout, because they cared about me enough to even tell me that the competition was the better solution. If that's the thing I needed, I think that can be a really powerful tool. But of course, you don't want to send all of your customers to competition. But I do think that when you're really caring about the customers, sometimes the answer isn't going to be your product, and that's OK.

Priscilla: 48:05

Well, that was a great question from Gwen, so thank you for sending that in, gwen. Remember to share your stories or questions by emailing us at happytohelp at buzzsproutcom or by using the text, the show link in our episode description, and those will both come directly to us and we will choose one of those to share on our episode next week. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review and follow us on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else where you listen to podcasts, and find us on Instagram at happy to help pod. Thanks again for joining us today, cara, and thank you to everyone for listening. Now go and make someone's day.