You don't strike me as the type...
3But I'll ask anyway.
Do you have any built in responses to growth/change/problems?
The one I can think of to best illustrate this right now is: "If Customer Support is X days out at responding to messages for Y weeks, we need to Z."
Do you guys plan stuff like that out? Or wing it as needed, relying on the communication and adaptation skills of your small team?
Is there a preference to adaptation over planning?
With your history and experience, which serves your company best?
Which do your customers respond to more favorably? Or at least bitch less about?
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@Thumperchick Great question. I'm no @snapster but I'll take a stab at it. With many start up/small companies the truth lies somewhere in the middle of all of the above.
We are a small team at the moment, as you mentioned, but we are growing all the time in areas you all may not always be able to see at a surface level. While I can't give specifics on hiring decisions I can say that we are constantly monitoring how things are going and doing our best to adapt when we aren't able to execute a plan before that change is needed.
Sometimes a large sale in one area or a colossal mistake in another might skew the numbers for a bit to make it seem that we need to make immediate changes when it may not actually be a need at the moment. And other times small changes here and there can create a snowball effect that leads us to uncovering a need we were unaware of before the changes were made.
We do our best to forecast our needs in advance but are completely open to adapting on the fly and being a bit reactionary when we have to. As for preference, well I imagine that depends on who you ask but I think being as prepared as possible up front is typically the best idea.
Our CS team is definitely backed up right now and we understand that can take a toll on the community so we are doing everything we can in the background to make sure that gets addressed. That includes creating forum write ups to answer common questions up front, evaluating options to grow the team, and pulling people in from other parts of the company to help out as much as possible.
I know that was all a bit vague but it's tough to get in to too many specifics without disclosing a bit of information that may be intended for internal folks only - even with us being a fairly transparent company.
TL:DR Yea we try to plan out as much as we can but consider ourselves to be pretty good at adapting on the fly when we have to.
Let me know if you have any questions, I love these kinds of posts!
@MEHcus Thanks for taking the time to answer! I know you guys have been crazy busy over there. I may have secretly been hoping for an "oh shit" button, but I'll take broad planning with room to maneuver.
I didn't mean to single out support, they were just the most visible thing to illustrate my question, a few weeks backed up may feel never-ending, but doesn't necessarily mean anything is wrong - rather that your volume of sales is high enough to warrant an influx of "oops!"
What's the volume of questions for Checkout.org vs Meh like?
@dashcloud I don't have exact numbers (I could probably find them, but @MEHcus is better at that stuff) but I'd have to guess the average checkout.org user writes in more often than a Meh user but we have a lot more people on Meh.
@JonT does it seem that checkout.org gets more questions because of the nature of the service? Since the site that led the user to purchase is not the place where their order information is stored? Or is it some other factor?
@dashcloud On a strictly per capita basis, we receive more from checkout.org than we do meh. But in terms of real numbers day to day, it's probably about a 70-30 to 75-25 split with more questions coming from meh users. But again, as @JonT mentioned, we simply have a higher volume of users on Meh day to day.
@Thumperchick That can definitely be a pretty big factor but they also tend to come in with the same types of questions we get day to day from our meh users as well.
Ooh, one of the answers has popped up!
When CS gets buried you find a way to eliminate as many non-support related emails as possible... by sending emails to everyone. Sorry guys, but hey - we might see more @hollboll and @MEHcus gifs in the forums again as they are allowed to peek their head's out from mountains of FAQ type email!