Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
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Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
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Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#2It's pretty interesting to think about how to scale rotations of All Hands Support. It's one thing when you are like 4 people, but as you build a company there are a lot of resource constraints to think about. What's the biggest company you guys have seen that still does rotations?
Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#3It's pretty interesting to think about how to scale rotations of All Hands Support. It's one thing when you are like 4 people, but as you build a company there are a lot of resource constraints to think about. What's the biggest company you guys have seen that still does rotations?
I believe Zappos makes all new employees do a one time two-week rotation on the support team, regardless of their position.
Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#4That's a great idea. I'd be really interested to see how this works out as you scale. How do you continue to consolidate and relay feedback from customers to the rest of the team that isn't on the support rotation?
Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#5It's pretty interesting to think about how to scale rotations of All Hands Support. It's one thing when you are like 4 people, but as you build a company there are a lot of resource constraints to think about. What's the biggest company you guys have seen that still does rotations?
Certainly a big issue is scale. For example if your company grows sufficiently large, there are people who do not know how at least one of your products works at your company.
You could fix this by partitioning who supports what, but even that won't work completely. Is your accountant going to do support for your enterprise or consumer products?
Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#6It's pretty interesting to think about how to scale rotations of All Hands Support. It's one thing when you are like 4 people, but as you build a company there are a lot of resource constraints to think about. What's the biggest company you guys have seen that still does rotations?
I believe Zappos makes all new employees do a one time two-week rotation on the support team, regardless of their position.
I've seen it done at on-boarding with companies like Freshbooks and Zappos, but I am not sure how often that experience is renewed. (i.e. the rotation aspect being more than one time)
Engineers at Zappos do support for just a few hours a year doing peak season after that onboarding. With a program called "Holiday Helpers" - http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/zappos-family/2011/12/20/holid...
Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#7National Instruments does something interesting with their customer support. NI is one of those companies that hires mostly college grads then tries to keep people around forever. If you are a college grad hired into NI, will will spend 6-12 months in their customer support division. This applies to almost everyone regardless of degree.
They do this for a few reasons from what I understand. It helps indoctrinate newhires to the NI culture. It also helps the people figure out what department they will enjoy and be a good fit into, as they will get exposure to a large part of the companies product portfolio.
Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#8That's a great idea. I'd be really interested to see how this works out as you scale. How do you continue to consolidate and relay feedback from customers to the rest of the team that isn't on the support rotation?
Consolidating feedback is a problem for any team at scale regardless of who is doing the support. Dedicated customer service teams have a more complete view of what's going on with customers, than the average rotated employee, but at the same time both need a way to bubble up that feedback to the product team.
More importantly, it's essential to understand the difference between the problem you head about today, verses the problem that customers have been facing for a long time. (I do think that support rotations cause a bit of a recency affect in prioritization for better or worse)
In the long run my argument is the closer you are to your customers the better insight you'll have in general. Because we all make a ton of decisions that aren't clearly specified, and we want everyone on the team to have the best intuition for the customer when they make those decisions.
Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#9That's a great idea. I'd be really interested to see how this works out as you scale. How do you continue to consolidate and relay feedback from customers to the rest of the team that isn't on the support rotation?
Things like JIRA tickets to collate feedback and build a list of interested customers who will be potential beta customers.
Re: Why We Do All-Hands Support at Olark
#10It's a great policy. Stripe was doing this 2 years ago: http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture Anyone know if they still do it, even after growing?