Nykki
Yeager
Many support teams operate only during set
business hours. The thing is, customers don’t limit their activities to those
hours. Customers could (and probably do!) use your product at any time of the
day or week, and they’ve come to expect help any time they need it. In fact, 57%
of them expect the same response time at night and on weekends as they do
during normal business hours.
Being available on weekends has its benefits
regardless of industry. As your business grows, and especially if it expands
internationally, the potential window of time during which customers might need
help gets wider. And as that happens, it becomes increasingly important for
support teams to think about staffing new shifts for round-the-clock
and weekend coverage.
Indeed, not having coverage on your queue for
an entire two-day period introduces a lot of risk. If there’s a problem, your
team might not spot it until Monday. That leaves a lot of frustrated
customers without a lifeline, not to mention creating quite a painful start
to the week as your team plays cleanup crew from the havoc wrought over the
course of Saturday and Sunday.
Help Scout has already written about transitioning to 24-hour
support, which requires covering a lot more hours, including potential
graveyard shifts. While moving into weekend work is similar, you do have
different options to consider. The upside of offering weekend support is clear,
but not every company needs it at every stage. How do you know if it’s the
right time for you?
Seeing the signs
1. Complaints about your
availability
Depending on your unique customer base and
what they’re doing with your product over the weekend, the urgency of your
customers’ needs and their desires for immediate assistance will vary.
In software, many customers often work on
weekends, too. If you’re not around to help, a problem could lead to big
disruptions in your customers’ work. Especially for enterprise customers, this
could mean a lot of lost revenue for them and a decrease in trust in your
company.
This was the case for Charlotte Ward’s team at
Tacit Knowledge: “We only took
top severity issues and usually there was a lot of money riding on the
outcome.”
One of the best ways to get a sense of how
much customers want weekend support is simply to listen. If they’re not happy
with your availability, they’ll complain through your CSAT or NPS surveys or
directly in their conversations with you.
Diana Potter, Customer Support Team Lead at Qwilr, picked up on how customer feedback took a
180 degree turn after they implemented their weekend shifts: “Before, we tended
to get angry comments. ‘You’re not around on weekends?!’ Now, we see so much
customer gratitude and so many comments from customers, like ‘I can’t believe
you answered on a weekend. That’s such a lifesaver!’ It was really interesting
to see this switch.”
2. Uneven response times
If your response times go through the roof at
the beginning of the week and taper off toward the end, that’s often a result
of backlog that builds up over the weekend. Come Monday morning, when you have
an inbox full of aged conversations, you’re already starting the week behind.
While you’re spending all day Monday answering
the conversations that came in over the weekend, the conversations that come in
on Monday may not get answered until Tuesday. This continues throughout the
week until you finally, maybe, get close to being caught up on Friday.
Not only does this roller coaster of response
times have a negative effect on your customer experience, it’s also stressful
for your team as they see the inbox growing, response times slowing, and
customers getting more impatient.
Potter cited quicker issue detection as one of
the biggest benefits to adding weekend availability at Qwilr. She explains:
“Nothing sucks more than a new customer hitting a bug at 7 p.m. on a Friday and
then stressing all weekend.”
3. Inbound volume on
weekends is high
If your inbound volume on weekends is high,
it’s probably time to offer weekend support. This one is the most obvious sign,
but it’s often overlooked. For teams who aren’t already working them, Saturdays
and Sundays sometimes go unnoticed. They’re not considered to be part of the
work week, so they’re not assessed in typical reporting.
If you look at the distribution of your
inbound volume over the course of all seven days, you may be surprised. If
volume were to be evenly distributed, for example, then Saturday and Sunday
would comprise 29% of your total inquiries. That’s a lot of conversations to
leave unattended.
However, it’s likely that your volume isn’t
perfectly dispersed across all seven days of the week. Your business may see a
dip over the weekend, or it could see a peak. In fact, Sunday is
the second most popular day for e-commerce shopping, likely producing a
spike in inbound volume for some teams. There may be other reasons for weekend
volume, like having a billing cycle that runs in a way such that important
dates often land on Saturdays.
The only way to know is to look into your data.
Ash Rhodes used data to get buy-in for adding a new shift in his role as
Director of Customer Support at vidIQ: “I
could immediately tell that there was trouble with there being no weekend
support. But you need hard numbers.”
If you see a lot of inbound volume, that’s an
indicator that it’s time to consider adding Saturday and Sunday shifts. It’s
also a great way to build a business case for the resources you’ll need to do
it.
Making it happen
Once you know that you want to provide weekend
support, you’ll need to choose a structure for how to do it. This structure
will depend on the amount and spread of your inbound volume, as well as the
number of people on your team.
Look at exactly how many conversations come in
over the course of the weekend. Compare that to how many conversations one
person typically answers in a shift. There may be enough volume coming in to
justify one shift, or maybe more, maybe less: The goal is to schedule coverage
at times when customers are contacting you the most, without burning out your
team. There are a few ways you can arrange this.
1. Dedicated coverage
With dedicated coverage, people work set
shifts on a regular basis. When you have high volume on weekends and a growing
team, this can be the best option because it means that most conversations can
be answered as they come in, and there’s no burden of maintaining a rotating
schedule.
Often, you can hire people specifically to
work on Saturdays and Sundays, either as part-time or full-time employees who
take time off during the week. This is beneficial for employees who are used to
working Monday through Friday because they can keep their normal schedules, and
people who are hired for weekends will take the job knowing that it’s part of
the role.
Frequently, these will be people for whom
working these days better suits their lifestyles or their needs. By offering
weekend work, you open up access to a more diverse set of skilled people for
whom typical business hours aren’t feasible or desirable.
When Catherine Bodry, Head of Support
Operations, was building her team at Loco2,
she knew not to underestimate the number of people who would be open to working
weekends, because she remembered a time when she worked weekends herself:
“Initially, there was an assumption that we
wouldn’t be able to find anyone who wanted to work weekends, though I vocally
disagreed with this. In my twenties, I loved working weekends because most of
my peers didn’t work regular Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 jobs, and having
weekdays off meant I had hiking trails all to myself!”
Dedicated coverage is the most
resource-intensive model, and it’s not right for every team. If you have lower
volume or prefer to ease into weekend work, you could try a rotating or on-call
model.
2. Rotating coverage
Rotating coverage is where employees take
turns covering shifts. This makes it a better model for smaller teams with
lower volume.
Depending on the size of your team, the
cadence of each shift will vary, perhaps coming up once a month or once a
quarter. Consider having people outside your support team take part in
rotations, like Potter’s team at Qwilr. It’s a great way to build customer
knowledge across the organization as well as spreading the load.
One thing to keep in mind with all weekend
coverage, but especially with rotating coverage, is that there may only be one
person working at any given time. With no one to chat with or ask questions of,
this shift can be isolating. Consider adding a double rotation if it suits your
team better. They may prefer to work twice as often than to work by themselves.
On a similar note, if your managers aren’t
working on weekends, make sure there are clear escalation procedures so that if
there’s a crisis, your team knows who to get in touch with and how to do it.
One last note: Rotating coverage can be
difficult from a scheduling and logistical standpoint and can create a lot of
operational overhead. Things always pop up, and shifts need to be adjusted.
Based on the experience and advice from these leaders, when your team starts to
grow, it’s often better to move into dedicated coverage.
3. On-call coverage
If your volume is very low or spread out over
the course of the day, then an on-call model might suit you best. This means
having employees who check in periodically to field any issues as they arise,
rather than working full, dedicated shifts.
An on-call shift for one person could cover
the entire weekend, an entire weekend day, or set time frames within the
weekend. It depends on the size of your team and the preferences of your
employees.
With that said, it’s important to have
sufficient coverage, but it’s also important to minimize the impact on your
team. On-call work does take a toll. To avoid burnout,
try to rotate on-call responsibilities, with several weeks of downtime in
between.
Other important factors
As with everything, it’s important to keep an
ear to the ground to understand how well your weekend support is functioning so
you can iterate with your team and communicate with your customers.
1. Remain flexible
A weekend support system that was initially
working perfectly will need adjustments as your support needs change. Changes
in your support volume, higher customer expectations, new SLA or VIP support
requirements, or changes in your support staff can all be triggers.
To monitor whether changes are needed,
consider the following indicators:
·
Increasing First Reply
Time — if your weekend
support strategy can’t keep up with the incoming volume, it might be time for a
change.
·
Employee NPS or agent
feedback — if your weekend
support staff becomes burnt out from dealing with stressful caseloads on their
off hours, they might need more support than they are currently receiving.
·
Your marketing and
sales promises — if your company is
promoting seven-day coverage, that may put added pressure on a lightly staffed
weekend crew.
Depending on the needs of your staff and
customers, your weekend strategy might evolve from “one person checking in over
the weekend” to “a few people with defined times over the weekend” to “fully
scheduled weekend support.” Staying flexible will ensure you’re meeting the
needs of your staff and your customers.
2. Set expectations
No matter which model you choose, it’s
important to let your customers know what to expect. It’s very often the case
that even with weekend coverage, response times may be slightly slower. Or you
might offer 24-hour availability during weekdays without being able to promise
that on Saturdays and Sundays.
Clearly
communicate your hours of availability on your help site and in any
automated replies you send to customers. Ash Rhodes put it best when he
emphasized a key principle in customer support: “Under promise, over deliver.”
Bring on the weekend!
Adjusting to weekend support will take some
time for you and your team. But when you take the time to plan accordingly and
roll out a solid weekend support plan, your customers will thank you for
meeting their needs — every day of the week.
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