An Archetypal Week

December 07, 2016

This is my fifth post for the 6 week Support Driven writing challenge. For this post, the topic is “Tell us about a typical day in your life.”

I split my week and days between working in Support and working in Success. Support is what you’d expect: Answering emails, live chats, and Tweets. Success is working on proactive content, researching how customers are using our products, and campaigns reaching out to customers.

Before Work

I wake up anywhere between 7:30 AM - 9:30 AM. It depends on what I have planned for the morning. I might meet up with a friend for coffee, go to the gym, or sleep in as long as I can.

For breakfast, I’ll have a bowl of greek yogurt with granola. Before I log on for work, I’ll make a fussy cup of coffee with a Chemex or AeroPress.

Work

I start my day around 10:00 AM. I’ll hop into Slack to say hello to my team (we work remotely) and glance at Basecamp for what I missed.

At that point, I’ll turn my focus to what my role is for the day, support or success.

Support Days

My Support days are Monday, Thursday, and Friday. As you might expect, these are days where the work is done as it shows up.

When I load up Help Scout for the day, I’ll do my best to prioritize the cases in our queue: Are there any extremely urgent situations, are there any replies to European customers that I need to get out right away (to give them a chance to respond before their day is over).

From there, it’s heads down in the queue till lunch. I’ll also turn on Live Chat to have that available until 5:00 PM.

Lunch will happen between 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM. After lunch, it’s back into the queue.

For 3 hours I’m on alert monitoring shift for our transactional email service, Postmark. While on my shift, I’ll catch-up on my Pocket queue between alerts.

In my last hour of the day, I’ll follow-up on any Basecamp posts and finish up any to-dos. On Thursdays, I’ll write down any wandering thoughts from my previous Success days.

Success Days

My Success days are Tuesday and Wednesday. These days are much more focused than a support day. I’ll put Slack in DND (do not disturb). And I’m getting better at quitting Slack for a couple of hours.

As I said in the intro, Success is much more proactive work. Our goal in Success is to make our customers better developers, not just better Beanstalk users.

That’s where the content comes in. Maybe we find ourselves having to teach customers Git often, to help out with that we can create a Getting Started with Git guide. It can be blog posts, guides, or help articles.

Research is looking at all the data available like support requests and behavioral analytics. We try to find wedges here to make our customers more successful. Maybe there’s a pitfall we see people falling into. With that information, we can suggest product improvements or content to create.

A campaign would be reaching out to customers who haven’t reached MVE (minimum viable effort, i.e., the point of realizing the value of a product). It could also be reaching out to customers that we’ve identified that are at risk for churn. For example, I am planning to reach out to customers in a suspended state (payment is failing).

As you might be able to tell, there’s a lot of possibilities for what a Success day can look like hour by hour.

After Work

Around 6:00 PM I’ll start shutdown procedures (close the laptop lid) and end my day. There are no set plans for after work.

On days that my beautiful wife works, she won’t get home until 8:00 PM. The days she works I’ll cook dinner and on her days off she’ll cook dinner.

Some nights after work I might meet up with friends to watch a sporting event, or we might have a friend over for board games.

I’m a night owl and will stay up later than my wife. I’ll work on a project like this blog post or become terrified of technology by watching Black Mirror.