Gamification Of Support

When I first started at Harbr, it was nothing more than an idea that had taken seed in the minds of our two founders, Gary Butler and Anthony Cosgrove. It then progressed onto a whiteboard, we started selling the idea, successful funding rounds followed, the technology took off, we started getting customers and then suddenly we were knee deep in help requests and we were on the line to deliver enterprise grade support to some of the largest data organisations in the world.

Past Experience

Having worked in various IT roles over the last few years, I understand how support is perceived internally. It’s typically the job that nobody wants to do because you’re on the front line dealing with issues in your software, you’re responsible for interacting with customers who are having a hard time and you having to juggle the internal politics of engineering and product within your own company. Combine all of that with the fact that most issues seem to be fertilised by darkness, which means that the majority of the really big issues that get raised come in when everybody who needs to deal with them are sleeping. All in all, nobody enjoys being on call.

Current Challenges

As the newly appointed Head of Support, I found myself facing a handful of different paths and decisions that needed to be made to be able to deliver support at an enterprise level. One option was to hire a team of engineers and first responders around the world, to provide follow the sun support to all of our customers. This proves to be extremely costly, and is naturally going to be a challenge for any startup to achieve. A second option was to allocate mandatory hours for support internally between the engineering and product team, and work out the compensation method that accounted for their discomfort. People don’t respond well to being given mandatory hours at all, and whatever compensation is given almost always comes across as too low for the demanding work that needs to get done.

With that all in mind, I went back to the drawing board and created a list of my exact requirements for support to work, as well as a list of the things I wanted to avoid. The result, I am proud to announce, has just gone live today. I have decided to gamify the support process in Harbr, to involve everybody in the company from CEO to the most junior intern in support.

The basic framework is as follows:

• People select the hours they are willing to be on support, one week in advance. There is a maximum threshold here to ensure that nobody is straining themselves, and ensure that slots are evenly distributed to the entire team.
• Each hour has an associated points value, which gets allocated to the person that takes that slot. Different hours are worth different points, built to incentivise the hours that people typically don’t want to work.
• Any slots that don’t get allocated by Friday, go on ‘Sale’. Slots that are on Sale are worth bonus points, and the normal weekly limit on slots is removed. All participants are able to request a slot on Sale, which then enters them into a draw for the slot on Saturday.
• Any slots that don’t get taken, get automatically allocated to the current support team.
• Points are accumulated weekly, monthly and annually.
• Points result in various rewards. Rewards are based on monthly, annual and milestone accumulated points, built to incentivise continuous and consistent participation over time.

Benefits

There are many inherent benefits of this model. By increasing the total amount of people involved in first line support, we effectively lower the total number of issues that any one person is faced with in a week. Also, by using existing employees, the overall cost is reduced by not needing to expand the team on dedicated first line supporters, offset by the cost of the rewards. By giving people the ability to select the hours that they want to be on call, people are able to pick the slots that work best for them and they feel that it is their choice as opposed to a mandatory burden applied to them. By making the entire process fun and interactive, it becomes a part of the company culture that grows and thrives over time. By getting the entire company involved in the support process, we expose everybody to the product that we build as well as the customers that are using it. All participants are converted into sympathisers of the requirements on the Product and Engineering teams, and the delicate balancing act that takes place between feature requests and support requests. Most importantly of all, everybody gets a chance to share as well as absorb the knowledge of everyone else when it comes to supporting the platform, which means that we move away from single points of failure or locked down knowledge on features or infrastructure.

More to come

There are many elements that still need to be added and accounted for, and there will be multiple updates to this over time. For now, the process has just kicked off and I look forward to the journey and the learnings ahead.