Have you hired support staff (part-time)?
Hey all!
Coming to the size where I wake up to 15-20 support e-mails every morning, with just as much coming over the day. With a full-time job and other things on my table, it's a major source of stress.
I wanted to see if any of you have experience with hiring out support, especially part-time? I've seen some services that allow you to hire 24/7 support, but that's too much and out of my budget. I'd need someone who can do first-level support a few times per day, catch all the frequently asked questions of people who didn't read the FAQ, and direct crucial issues, bug reports etc. to me.
Any tips?
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Definitely adding myself to the convo here as I've been thinking about the same thing recently.
I wouldn't discount trying some more automation first. Hiring someone will require training, management, quality checks, and so on, this can eat up more time than you expect. You need to do some analysis on the types of support questions you are doing. If most / a fair chunk are bug reports etc. that you will have to work on anyway, hiring someone won't free up any of your time. On the other hand if a lot of support requests are common issues and from people that didn't read the FAQ, this is ripe for some automation. Have a drop down select on your contact form with the most common issues. If someone selects one, send an automated response on how to handle it. They should still have the possibility to escalate if their problem is not solved, at which point you can step in and handle manually
Yeah, thanks for this. I've been recording and trying to categorize the kind of emails I am getting over the past few days. Not a ton of overlap so far, but I hope that'll change over the next few weeks.
Thanks for the post, I've always wondered at what point should something think about hiring for their customer support/service
yes. i have a part-time person right now helping me build. it's fine, for now, but, i'm looking for ft help.
another way of doing this is limiting how your customers engage with you...
Where/how did you hire them?
I think I already limited it to a good amount. I have a FAQ, a handbook and not a super obvious contact page.
I sometimes get Drift chat requests about FAQ items FROM the FAQ, so those are really just the crucial issues and everything else that splits through
i recruited normlaly. via the usual channels as well as using my relationship network.