Support Notes from the Beach
The sand really does get everywhere
I’m on a mini family vacation on Cape Cod this weekend and it put me in mind of the question of support coverage. Obviously this is a bigger topic than just vacations, but give me a break. I’m at the beach. This week we’re going to talk about: how do you both ensure your support issues get answered and still let people take vacation (or get sick, for that matter)? This is a particularly tricky issue on tiny teams, where even one absence is felt keenly, but the principles are the same no matter the size of the team.
When determining support coverage, it is essential to remember that your engineers—and you!—are human beings, not machines. You need time off to recharge, you get sick, you have personal lives. Any support coverage structure that doesn’t build in redundancy for absences, either with or without notice, is doomed to degrade or even collapse sooner or later. That being said, there are a few different ways to avoid unnecessary customer frustration when planning for the inevitable times your team will be understaffed. These options are not mutually exclusive—using two or more in concert may be your best bet.
Limit support hours
Honestly this is something you should have already considered even outside the scope of dealing with vacations and illness. If your team is just one person, do you really think that person can handle 24/7 coverage for any length of time before burning out? That’s an extreme example but it’s just as ridiculous to expect 24/7 from a team of any fewer than 6, at bare minimum. (Stay tuned for another post where I talk about how I get to this number. Even 6 is probably way too low.)
Be realistic about what a smaller team can accomplish when setting customer expectations. And while you’re doing this, think carefully about what the support load will look like when you’re down 1, 2, or more of your team.
Cultivate backups outside the team
Cross-training is a central way of ensuring that support skills exist even outside the support team proper, and helping during times of high load or lowered team availability is a key reason why that’s important. Especially on a small team, you will periodically run into situations where there is a surge of customer issues that leaves you swamped, or more than 50% of your team is out leaving everyone else playing catch-up, or both. Having a bench of support-trained folks on other teams that you can draw on in emergencies can be the difference between making it through those rough days and collapsing under the strain.
Set customer expectations during times of lower coverage
On my last team we always ran into issues around the holidays, at least until the team was large enough to fairly split holiday breaks over two weeks. Everyone needed time off, and the skeleton crew remaining, consisting primarily of support leadership and upper management, weren’t enough to provide the same level of support our customers had gotten accustomed to. Our solution was to temporarily institute an autoresponse email:
Due to the holidays, our coverage is temporarily limited until January 2. During this time, our response time may be delayed. If you have an urgent issue, please update the ticket with that information or contact Andy directly at andy@xxxxxxx.com. Thanks for your understanding, and happy holidays!
With this email setting the tone for subsequent support interactions, we tended to get two types of customer responses: one assuring us that it wasn’t urgent, it could wait, no problem, and one confirming that it was, in fact, an emergency. We empowered our engineers on duty to take it easy on the former category and enjoy their holiday. A side effect of this was that they always had time for the genuinely urgent issues, if any actually came in. By giving the engineer working the holiday additional latitude during those understaffed days, we were able to ensure that the high priority issues were addressed even though we were very understaffed compared to a regular day. Of course, it helps that ticket load tends to be very light on holidays!
Though this only scratches the surface of the much larger topic of support coverage, I hope it helps get you thinking in the right directions around planning your own team’s coverage needs, particularly around handling vacations and unplanned absences.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!