Testing Zulip
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@Dashrender said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@Dashrender said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
We have a separate team that deals just with customer service handling. We try hard to never let phones go to voicemail, and I think we only see that once every several months (like two to three times a year.) We have a tiered desk that answers the phones, then their managers and a few techs who have volunteered take calls if the front line is overwhelmed, which is rare since Paul and I ring with the front line so if they are swamped, we tend to know and can grab calls before they go to managers like @valentina and then we typically, depending on the path, have a third tier that can catch most calls if they fall through both of those levels and if, by some unbelievable situation, it makes it all the way through the third tier, it goes to voicemail that automatically emails everyone to find someone to deal with a customer that's tried to call and couldn't get through. THEN a tech might respond immediately because they couldn't get to triage. But like I said, 2-3 times a year. It's rare and we staff up to make sure it stays at about that rate.
Generally the front line takes a call, puts in a ticket while on the phone, finds the right tech, and transfers (along with the ticket and notes) directly to the tech. It's not a delaying tactic, it's to allow the triage layer to find the right resource that both has the right technical skill set and is currently available to step in. Otherwise, we'd have techs grabbing the phone and you might be calling about a printer and get a storage guy or something.
The CEO and CIO are taking helpdesk calls? That cannot be a good use of company money? That just seems crazy.
Well, he's not alone - my boss constantly takes phone calls, she can't allow technology to do it's job - i.e. go to VM, we'll call them back.
Well, she could argue that VM's job is to catch when IT can't get to it, and by picking it up, IT did it's job and got to it. So the VM was still doing its job, it just didn't have to do anything because IT also did its.
When and how did IT come into this? I wouldn't have asked this question if you said CIO/CEO because that's what we are talking about. But you just mentioned, "better than sitting idle." Well sure OK, if you as the CIO are sitting idle, absolutely answer the phone - but my boss is anything but, she has 3 weeks worth of work sitting on her desk. Answering the phone puts her further and further behind.
Your boss is IT, maybe not only IT, but she's IT as she is the CIO function, so one way or another, her actions can cover IT.
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@Dashrender said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@Dashrender said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
We have a separate team that deals just with customer service handling. We try hard to never let phones go to voicemail, and I think we only see that once every several months (like two to three times a year.) We have a tiered desk that answers the phones, then their managers and a few techs who have volunteered take calls if the front line is overwhelmed, which is rare since Paul and I ring with the front line so if they are swamped, we tend to know and can grab calls before they go to managers like @valentina and then we typically, depending on the path, have a third tier that can catch most calls if they fall through both of those levels and if, by some unbelievable situation, it makes it all the way through the third tier, it goes to voicemail that automatically emails everyone to find someone to deal with a customer that's tried to call and couldn't get through. THEN a tech might respond immediately because they couldn't get to triage. But like I said, 2-3 times a year. It's rare and we staff up to make sure it stays at about that rate.
Generally the front line takes a call, puts in a ticket while on the phone, finds the right tech, and transfers (along with the ticket and notes) directly to the tech. It's not a delaying tactic, it's to allow the triage layer to find the right resource that both has the right technical skill set and is currently available to step in. Otherwise, we'd have techs grabbing the phone and you might be calling about a printer and get a storage guy or something.
The CEO and CIO are taking helpdesk calls? That cannot be a good use of company money? That just seems crazy.
Well, he's not alone - my boss constantly takes phone calls, she can't allow technology to do it's job - i.e. go to VM, we'll call them back.
Is your boss the CIO/CEO? They are taking the calls so that the manager doesn't have to. Does your CEO take calls so your manager doesn't have to?
That's what I do. I mean I'm COO but potato potahto. I take calls when I'm not in the midsts of something if it is going to interrupt managers who likely are. But if I'm in the middle of something, I let them fall through.
Now that doesn't really make sense - putting yourself at a higher likeliness to be interrupted than the managers I assume you pay much less than yourself - plus, we outsiders assume answering the overflow calls from their team is a managers stated duty.
How did I end up more likely to be interrupted? Didn't I explain how I avoid this causing interruptions proactively so that you wouldn't think this? I specifically described how I only do it when it's not interrupting something.
And just because something is someone's stated duty doesn't change that the goal of the executives is total business success, not to just make underlings work harder.
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@Dashrender said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
There isn't a universe where having more helpdesk people to answer the phones makes less sense than the highest paid people in the company.
You know, I used to work in restaurants and our regional manager used to say essentially the same thing. He felt that the managers should manage, the workers should "do" and that you got your best results by keeping them separate, that if the manager wasn't always actively managing that they were wasted. They were, after all, paid more than any worker.
My shop always ignored this, for a few reasons. One, just the math showed that it didn't work. Not at a restaurant scale, anyway. And it missed a few key concepts, like that the manager managing but never doing was often lost and not able to manage well. And that it made the workers feel like "us vs them" and not like a team. It also meant that you needed more workers.
My team was the highest performance team in the franchise group, which was state wide (like sixty restaurants.) We eventually were used to go into other restaurants and save them when they were failing. Our secret?
I treated the workers like they were valuable, I did as much work as them (okay, not quite, they were just better than me, but I tried), they saw us as a team and knew we were there for each other, and we didn't staff the place with people who weren't doing anything. When things were slow, they cleaned and I did paperwork. When the rushes hit, I was in the trenches with them whenever needed, in any position needed. We weren't just faster, but we also had less waste, and less staffing cost. We were the highest profit margins.
I avoided micromanaging, and managed by leading instead of by instructing. The difference that it made was significant.
The thing that I learned, and still apply today, is that there's no job beneath me. I do whatever is needed to make sure that the company runs smoothly - which is primarily making the team run like clockwork. Sure, I earn more than most of the team, but what makes me valuable enough to be paid that isn't that I'm normally doing some magical work that no one else could do or that I'm better or anything, it's that I magnify the people on the team to best effect. As great as it would be to be spending every moment of the day closing million dollar deals, there just aren't that many deals to be closing. When those happen, yeah, that's where I focus. When those aren't happening, I look for strategic opportunity. When I'm not tied up with that, I lead by example. I'm in the trenches, shoulder to shoulder with the team(s) whether they are management, engineering, customer service, sales, finance, etc.
This completely makes sense. Though as I mentioned, my boss has so much to do, that taking calls puts her behind, period. and if it was only 30 mins/week, 2 hours/month, we wouldn't even notice this, so we wouldn't mention it. But in her case it can be an hour plus a day.
But does she ACTUALLY have so much to do? She is a micromanager, I believe, and the issue isn't that she is busy or too busy, but that she's not a good manager. That's a different problem.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
That's $125/hr that I'd be covering versus hiring a customer service person. But I'm not only covering for customer service, but for an engineer. I'm often solving a ticket fast without having to transfer. So I'm really covering more than $250/hr.
I don't understand this. You're at $125 an hour, and you're covering for a helpdesk person and an engineer. So they also make up $125 an hour?
No, we use $3 and $6 as the example.
then where does the $125 come from?
Just making reasonably large examples to show that with salaries that are far above industry average for the positions, and quite respectable, that even if being in the trenches had no other value other than protecting against additional hiring, and even using crazy low hourly cost numbers for the customer service and engineering teams, that around an hour a week would still show a cost benefit for the highly compensated executives to still get their hands dirty from time to time.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
I took one those calls tonight and am hoping it's over $100K of benefit because I did so. I definitely don't have many hours that make more money than that. Now, is it certainly $100K? No. Likely, actually yes. Keeping tabs on operations can have value.
That sounds like a sales call. What are the circumstances where a helpdesk call was over $100k in benefit?
That's the thing, helpdesk calls are often sales calls, when someone high enough to have the crossover knowledge is the one answering the phone. So one of the best ways to make sales (or you know "business development") is to keep doing some customer relationship / tech stuff. It's an amazing time to often get "chat time" with customers.
I honestly don't know how to respond to this one. This is just, I don't have words.
Not sure what you are trying to say. But having executives get time to chat with customers is a massive sales channel. Not just for us, for some of our customers too, they report the same thing. It's a path to get time to talk to the big decision makers that most techs can't do and most sales people can't get access to.
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
I took one those calls tonight and am hoping it's over $100K of benefit because I did so. I definitely don't have many hours that make more money than that. Now, is it certainly $100K? No. Likely, actually yes. Keeping tabs on operations can have value.
That sounds like a sales call. What are the circumstances where a helpdesk call was over $100k in benefit?
That's the thing, helpdesk calls are often sales calls, when someone high enough to have the crossover knowledge is the one answering the phone. So one of the best ways to make sales (or you know "business development") is to keep doing some customer relationship / tech stuff. It's an amazing time to often get "chat time" with customers.
I honestly don't know how to respond to this one. This is just, I don't have words.
Not sure what you are trying to say. But having executives get time to chat with customers is a massive sales channel. Not just for us, for some of our customers too, they report the same thing. It's a path to get time to talk to the big decision makers that most techs can't do and most sales people can't get access to.
So the sales people can't talk to decision makers. Who are they talking to? And how does you answering a helpdesk call get you talking to the decision makers instead of a sales person?
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
If your tickets can't give you that information, then you're doing the ticketing incorrectly. You should be able to see trends from your customer responses and adapt.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
I took one those calls tonight and am hoping it's over $100K of benefit because I did so. I definitely don't have many hours that make more money than that. Now, is it certainly $100K? No. Likely, actually yes. Keeping tabs on operations can have value.
That sounds like a sales call. What are the circumstances where a helpdesk call was over $100k in benefit?
That's the thing, helpdesk calls are often sales calls, when someone high enough to have the crossover knowledge is the one answering the phone. So one of the best ways to make sales (or you know "business development") is to keep doing some customer relationship / tech stuff. It's an amazing time to often get "chat time" with customers.
I honestly don't know how to respond to this one. This is just, I don't have words.
Not sure what you are trying to say. But having executives get time to chat with customers is a massive sales channel. Not just for us, for some of our customers too, they report the same thing. It's a path to get time to talk to the big decision makers that most techs can't do and most sales people can't get access to.
So the sales people can't talk to decision makers. Who are they talking to? And how does you answering a helpdesk call get you talking to the decision makers instead of a sales person?
Correct, no sales person would ever get the kinds of opportunities that I get. They might get a chance to have a quick conversation, but the kinds of conversations you get when owners talk to each other with time to kill and a much broader range of business options to discuss - no, effectively they never get that.
Because in the MSP world, a huge percentage of calls come in from owners or CEOs, and when not them, often key decision makers. We get 95% of our conversations with customer's decision makers because they call us and it's not us initiating a sales call. If you ignore your best and most active sales funnel, you lose sales.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
If your tickets can't give you that information, then you're doing the ticketing incorrectly. You should be able to see trends from your customer responses and adapt.
Yeah, tickets aren't magic. That sounds great, but no ticket system gives you that real insight.
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maybe check out https://www.igniterealtime.org/?
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I feel like this whole thing has turned into explaining basics of customer interactions. When a customer initiates an interaction you have a unique opportunity for gathering information, learning about the business, and doing sales that has absolutely no replacement, anywhere in the universe. None. It's an absolutely unique business moment.
This has nothing to do with IT, and is only something you can experience if you are an executive. You can't just hire someone to do it for you. You can't just implement software and have it do it. Sometimes you just have to talk to people, yourself.
And sales people are expensive. Ones that make sales, anyway. You can't just solve every problem by "pay someone else to do it". At some point, your own time needs to be spent. And even CEOs of Fortune 100s do this. Even presidents and governors. Executives are meant to execute.
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
That's $125/hr that I'd be covering versus hiring a customer service person. But I'm not only covering for customer service, but for an engineer. I'm often solving a ticket fast without having to transfer. So I'm really covering more than $250/hr.
I don't understand this. You're at $125 an hour, and you're covering for a helpdesk person and an engineer. So they also make up $125 an hour?
No, we use $3 and $6 as the example.
then where does the $125 come from?
Just making reasonably large examples to show that with salaries that are far above industry average for the positions, and quite respectable, that even if being in the trenches had no other value other than protecting against additional hiring, and even using crazy low hourly cost numbers for the customer service and engineering teams, that around an hour a week would still show a cost benefit for the highly compensated executives to still get their hands dirty from time to time.
I don't see how that example showed that. You said 4 hours a month at $125 an hour for just customer service. Add in the engineer that's $250 an hour. Except those aren't even remotely close. We know the engineer is $5-6 an hour. If you are making even $100k a year that's 16 times what only the engineer is worth.
So let's add in a help desk person at $3 an hour that's a total of $8 an hour. So that's $16,700 a year. You answering calls at $80 an hour, literally 10 times over what the other two roles combined amount to does not save you any money.
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@Grey said in Testing Zulip:
maybe check out https://www.igniterealtime.org/?
We used to use that, it's the best XMPP out there. Maybe it would be better for our use case, but from what I remember, it lacks the group chats, or did when we left it.
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
If your tickets can't give you that information, then you're doing the ticketing incorrectly. You should be able to see trends from your customer responses and adapt.
Yeah, tickets aren't magic. That sounds great, but no ticket system gives you that real insight.
I don't understand how they couldn't. They're categorized by type of issue.
You have stats for every single ticket. You don't get any insight from talking on the help desk once a month.
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
I feel like this whole thing has turned into explaining basics of customer interactions. When a customer initiates an interaction you have a unique opportunity for gathering information, learning about the business, and doing sales that has absolutely no replacement, anywhere in the universe. None. It's an absolutely unique business moment.
This has nothing to do with IT, and is only something you can experience if you are an executive. You can't just hire someone to do it for you. You can't just implement software and have it do it. Sometimes you just have to talk to people, yourself.
And sales people are expensive. Ones that make sales, anyway. You can't just solve every problem by "pay someone else to do it". At some point, your own time needs to be spent. And even CEOs of Fortune 100s do this. Even presidents and governors. Executives are meant to execute.
Yes, it's almost like I said the CEO should be driving the direction of the company AND DOING SALES.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
That's $125/hr that I'd be covering versus hiring a customer service person. But I'm not only covering for customer service, but for an engineer. I'm often solving a ticket fast without having to transfer. So I'm really covering more than $250/hr.
I don't understand this. You're at $125 an hour, and you're covering for a helpdesk person and an engineer. So they also make up $125 an hour?
No, we use $3 and $6 as the example.
then where does the $125 come from?
Just making reasonably large examples to show that with salaries that are far above industry average for the positions, and quite respectable, that even if being in the trenches had no other value other than protecting against additional hiring, and even using crazy low hourly cost numbers for the customer service and engineering teams, that around an hour a week would still show a cost benefit for the highly compensated executives to still get their hands dirty from time to time.
I don't see how that example showed that. You said 4 hours a month at $125 an hour for just customer service. Add in the engineer that's $250 an hour. Except those aren't even remotely close. We know the engineer is $5-6 an hour. If you are making even $100k a year that's 16 times what only the engineer is worth.
So let's add in a help desk person at $3 an hour that's a total of $8 an hour. So that's $16,700 a year. You answering calls at $80 an hour, literally 10 times over what the other two roles combined amount to does not save you any money.
Right, but we covered that this math is nonsensical. In the real world, value is not just adding up what you can pay someone by the hour, it's the total cost, which you are totally ignoring. You are ignoring all the costs of full time people vs. a few hours of someone else, and you are ignoring all the costs of acquiring, training, and managing those people. Basically, you are glossing over all aspects of cost and focused on one very specific one that essentially doesn't even matter.
You have to talk about the cost to deliver the service and then talk about the benefit of the service delivered. Look at this from a business perspective, rather than a staffing perspective.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
If your tickets can't give you that information, then you're doing the ticketing incorrectly. You should be able to see trends from your customer responses and adapt.
Yeah, tickets aren't magic. That sounds great, but no ticket system gives you that real insight.
I don't understand how they couldn't. They're categorized by type of issue.
You have stats for every single ticket. You don't get any insight from talking on the help desk once a month.
Because none of that even touches what we need to know. Sure, that information is super valuable. Crazy valuable. Absolutely. But it's anything but the full picture. It doesn't tell you about things that aren't reported, but are eluded to in discussions, it doesn't convey mood, it doesn't tell you about all of the things that are skipped in tickets. Tickets carry metrics and very dangerous ones. They are useful, but if you accept them blindly they can be very bad.
I actually have trained customers on this, because they accidentally exposed ticket metrics to their team and had high performance employees panic because the tickets made it look like they were working at 1/8th the rate of some other people. Because tickets aren't too good at giving the whole picture.
