Testing Zulip
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
That's $125/hr that I'd be covering versus hiring a customer service person. But I'm not only covering for customer service, but for an engineer. I'm often solving a ticket fast without having to transfer. So I'm really covering more than $250/hr.
I don't understand this. You're at $125 an hour, and you're covering for a helpdesk person and an engineer. So they also make up $125 an hour?
No, we use $3 and $6 as the example.
then where does the $125 come from?
Just making reasonably large examples to show that with salaries that are far above industry average for the positions, and quite respectable, that even if being in the trenches had no other value other than protecting against additional hiring, and even using crazy low hourly cost numbers for the customer service and engineering teams, that around an hour a week would still show a cost benefit for the highly compensated executives to still get their hands dirty from time to time.
I don't see how that example showed that. You said 4 hours a month at $125 an hour for just customer service. Add in the engineer that's $250 an hour. Except those aren't even remotely close. We know the engineer is $5-6 an hour. If you are making even $100k a year that's 16 times what only the engineer is worth.
So let's add in a help desk person at $3 an hour that's a total of $8 an hour. So that's $16,700 a year. You answering calls at $80 an hour, literally 10 times over what the other two roles combined amount to does not save you any money.
Right, but we covered that this math is nonsensical. In the real world, value is not just adding up what you can pay someone by the hour, it's the total cost, which you are totally ignoring. You are ignoring all the costs of full time people vs. a few hours of someone else, and you are ignoring all the costs of acquiring, training, and managing those people. Basically, you are glossing over all aspects of cost and focused on one very specific one that essentially doesn't even matter.
You have to talk about the cost to deliver the service and then talk about the benefit of the service delivered. Look at this from a business perspective, rather than a staffing perspective.
Their monthly pay is 3 hours of your work. If you're saying that hiring another person to handle more phone calls that costs approx 4 hours of your time per month isn't worth it, then I don't see how we can continue this discussion.
Aren't your employees 1099 anyway? What costs to acquire them really are there other than posting the position and interviewing?
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
I feel like this whole thing has turned into explaining basics of customer interactions. When a customer initiates an interaction you have a unique opportunity for gathering information, learning about the business, and doing sales that has absolutely no replacement, anywhere in the universe. None. It's an absolutely unique business moment.
This has nothing to do with IT, and is only something you can experience if you are an executive. You can't just hire someone to do it for you. You can't just implement software and have it do it. Sometimes you just have to talk to people, yourself.
And sales people are expensive. Ones that make sales, anyway. You can't just solve every problem by "pay someone else to do it". At some point, your own time needs to be spent. And even CEOs of Fortune 100s do this. Even presidents and governors. Executives are meant to execute.
Yes, it's almost like I said the CEO should be driving the direction of the company AND DOING SALES.
Sure, but I pointed out that getting in the trenches and working is a key part of both driving direction and sales, but you are arguing that since you can hire someone really, really inexpensive to fill those roles that since the CEO in theory earns more than that, that they shouldn't waste their time with it.
You can't have it both ways. How do you effectively set direction if you are disconnected? It's like driving from the backseat (or trunk.)
And how better to do sales than to be willing to talk to customers at the time that they are most likely to consider using your services?
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
If your tickets can't give you that information, then you're doing the ticketing incorrectly. You should be able to see trends from your customer responses and adapt.
Yeah, tickets aren't magic. That sounds great, but no ticket system gives you that real insight.
I don't understand how they couldn't. They're categorized by type of issue.
You have stats for every single ticket. You don't get any insight from talking on the help desk once a month.
Because none of that even touches what we need to know. Sure, that information is super valuable. Crazy valuable. Absolutely. But it's anything but the full picture. It doesn't tell you about things that aren't reported, but are eluded to in discussions, it doesn't convey mood, it doesn't tell you about all of the things that are skipped in tickets. Tickets carry metrics and very dangerous ones. They are useful, but if you accept them blindly they can be very bad.
I actually have trained customers on this, because they accidentally exposed ticket metrics to their team and had high performance employees panic because the tickets made it look like they were working at 1/8th the rate of some other people. Because tickets aren't too good at giving the whole picture.
You don't get any of that from a single call a month either. Unless you are doing this daily, you get none of what you are saying from answering the phone once in a while.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
If your tickets can't give you that information, then you're doing the ticketing incorrectly. You should be able to see trends from your customer responses and adapt.
Yeah, tickets aren't magic. That sounds great, but no ticket system gives you that real insight.
I don't understand how they couldn't. They're categorized by type of issue.
You have stats for every single ticket. You don't get any insight from talking on the help desk once a month.
Because none of that even touches what we need to know. Sure, that information is super valuable. Crazy valuable. Absolutely. But it's anything but the full picture. It doesn't tell you about things that aren't reported, but are eluded to in discussions, it doesn't convey mood, it doesn't tell you about all of the things that are skipped in tickets. Tickets carry metrics and very dangerous ones. They are useful, but if you accept them blindly they can be very bad.
I actually have trained customers on this, because they accidentally exposed ticket metrics to their team and had high performance employees panic because the tickets made it look like they were working at 1/8th the rate of some other people. Because tickets aren't too good at giving the whole picture.
You don't get any of that from a single call a month either. Unless you are doing this daily, you get none of what you are saying from answering the phone once in a while.
Why do you feel that way?
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
If your tickets can't give you that information, then you're doing the ticketing incorrectly. You should be able to see trends from your customer responses and adapt.
Yeah, tickets aren't magic. That sounds great, but no ticket system gives you that real insight.
I don't understand how they couldn't. They're categorized by type of issue.
You have stats for every single ticket. You don't get any insight from talking on the help desk once a month.
Because none of that even touches what we need to know. Sure, that information is super valuable. Crazy valuable. Absolutely. But it's anything but the full picture. It doesn't tell you about things that aren't reported, but are eluded to in discussions, it doesn't convey mood, it doesn't tell you about all of the things that are skipped in tickets. Tickets carry metrics and very dangerous ones. They are useful, but if you accept them blindly they can be very bad.
I actually have trained customers on this, because they accidentally exposed ticket metrics to their team and had high performance employees panic because the tickets made it look like they were working at 1/8th the rate of some other people. Because tickets aren't too good at giving the whole picture.
You don't get any of that from a single call a month either. Unless you are doing this daily, you get none of what you are saying from answering the phone once in a while.
Why do you feel that way?
It doesn't tell you about things that aren't reported, but are eluded to in discussions, it doesn't convey mood, it doesn't tell you about all of the things that are skipped in tickets.
Explain how you get any of that out of a single phone call.
Mary calls you because her Outlook is screwed up (prob not outlook but the example isn't the point). You handle that call, what did you learn from that interaction? What did you find out that was skipped in other tickets? What did you find out from that single phone call that gives you some kind of edge for the customer?
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
I actually have trained customers on this, because they accidentally exposed ticket metrics to their team and had high performance employees panic because the tickets made it look like they were working at 1/8th the rate of some other people. Because tickets aren't too good at giving the whole picture.
Strawman. I said you should be looking at the metrics, not the team themselves. You clearly know the difference in performance there.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
I actually have trained customers on this, because they accidentally exposed ticket metrics to their team and had high performance employees panic because the tickets made it look like they were working at 1/8th the rate of some other people. Because tickets aren't too good at giving the whole picture.
Strawman. I said you should be looking at the metrics, not the team themselves. You clearly know the difference in performance there.
Not a strawman, the point is that humans very, very rarely understand metrics. Metrics are confusing and even people trained on metrics (industrial engineering) rarely actually understand it. Using metrics too much is one of those standard business mistakes that they teach in business school. It looks good, it sounds good, it's easy to lead people with them, but at the end of the day they are statistics and while stats don't lie, the use of them usually does.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
Better than having them sit idle and not know what's going on in the company because they are so disconnected. At some point, those roles have to have jobs.
Yeah idk what this means. Their job is to drive the direction of the company. Sure in 5 person landscaping companies the "CEO" is doing some of the work. But if the company is as big as you are alluding to, the CEO should be driving the company forward and meeting with potential customers (if you guys don't have a sales team, I have no idea).
Sure, but how does one do that? You can't fill every second with "meeting with clients." Business isn't magic. If that were really true, we'd not even have offices, right? We'd only be talking to potential clients. But then to keep that schedule full, that would imply that we are basically an outbound sales team only, and doesn't that bring us back to square one?
You're taking one part of that argument and using that as all of what I said. Driving the direction AND meeting with potential customers.
Okay, but no desk needed for that
We have direction meetings and we specifically leave our desks (daily) for it here!
Ok? What does a desk have to do with any of what I said?
I thought that that was what you were responding to... that if that is all that executives were doing that why have desks at all as you'd always be doing non-desk tasks.
How much direction setting do we think executives really need to do? It's a critical job, for sure, but how much time does it take? And can you direction set better when sitting quietly pondering vs. getting in the trenches and seeing the needs of customers and the roles of staff first hand? I'd argue that getting your hands dirty can be pretty important to being good at direction setting. You can't spend all of your time doing that, but it's a valuable way to get insight into more aspects of the business.
If your tickets can't give you that information, then you're doing the ticketing incorrectly. You should be able to see trends from your customer responses and adapt.
Yeah, tickets aren't magic. That sounds great, but no ticket system gives you that real insight.
I don't understand how they couldn't. They're categorized by type of issue.
You have stats for every single ticket. You don't get any insight from talking on the help desk once a month.
Because none of that even touches what we need to know. Sure, that information is super valuable. Crazy valuable. Absolutely. But it's anything but the full picture. It doesn't tell you about things that aren't reported, but are eluded to in discussions, it doesn't convey mood, it doesn't tell you about all of the things that are skipped in tickets. Tickets carry metrics and very dangerous ones. They are useful, but if you accept them blindly they can be very bad.
I actually have trained customers on this, because they accidentally exposed ticket metrics to their team and had high performance employees panic because the tickets made it look like they were working at 1/8th the rate of some other people. Because tickets aren't too good at giving the whole picture.
You don't get any of that from a single call a month either. Unless you are doing this daily, you get none of what you are saying from answering the phone once in a while.
Why do you feel that way?
It doesn't tell you about things that aren't reported, but are eluded to in discussions, it doesn't convey mood, it doesn't tell you about all of the things that are skipped in tickets.
Explain how you get any of that out of a single phone call.
Mary calls you because her Outlook is screwed up (prob not outlook but the example isn't the point). You handle that call, what did you learn from that interaction? What did you find out that was skipped in other tickets? What did you find out from that single phone call that gives you some kind of edge for the customer?
I'll use the example from last night if that's okay. Instead of email it was a phone issue, they run their own phones but didn't know how to do something so they called in to have us do it for them. The owner made the call presumably because it was an hourly charge, not part of their normal support.
From that interaction we had time that we had to sit on the phone, the owner and I, which lead to a conversation about our business plans and relocations and stuff. It turns out that she and I used to live on the same road, in Granada! While talking about why we have staff moving there, we casually talked about other services that we do and I asked her some staffing questions which I need help with, but she didn't have any insight. Then, based on things she knew that we did because of the call, but nothing I approached her about, she brought up a multi-million dollar deal that we are going meet about again today (the deal is big, our portion is more like $100K like I mentioned before.)
It only happened because we had time where she had reached out to us so it was a non-sales owner to owner call where we were both free to discuss the highest level of deals, but were doing so casually and she was free to learn about more about what we did, and felt comfortable bringing a deal to us rather than us trying to sell the idea to her.
Also, it gives us a much better position for the transaction.
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In some cases, I would have learned about phone support issues on this call. But I already knew the situation at this customer about that. But it's a spot where easily that could have been an opportunity, as well.
Now, could I have learned about that one from a ticket? Yes, that's possible. Could I have learned as well and been in such a good position to discuss opportunity, probably not. But close.
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@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@Grey said in Testing Zulip:
maybe check out https://www.igniterealtime.org/?
We used to use that, it's the best XMPP out there. Maybe it would be better for our use case, but from what I remember, it lacks the group chats, or did when we left it.
Last time I used it, group chat was included. The spark client was a little wonky, but good once you figured out the various functions. Chat via cell clients worked, too, though they used a different client with the firewall doing port forwards. Pretty sweet once it's set up.
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@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
@stacksofplates said in Testing Zulip:
@scottalanmiller said in Testing Zulip:
I took one those calls tonight and am hoping it's over $100K of benefit because I did so. I definitely don't have many hours that make more money than that. Now, is it certainly $100K? No. Likely, actually yes. Keeping tabs on operations can have value.
That sounds like a sales call. What are the circumstances where a helpdesk call was over $100k in benefit?
That's the thing, helpdesk calls are often sales calls, when someone high enough to have the crossover knowledge is the one answering the phone. So one of the best ways to make sales (or you know "business development") is to keep doing some customer relationship / tech stuff. It's an amazing time to often get "chat time" with customers.
I honestly don't know how to respond to this one. This is just, I don't have words.
As one who answered more than a few calls a day while in the employ of NTG,
There were likely 3-10 calls a month that I got that were looking for setting up services, or offering services.
As in the capacity of Tier 1, had to be passed on. So, when Scott or Paul got those- it was more time for me to address the ‘printer’ issues
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I hated zulip for the same thing, sad to hear the Rocketchat. So push notifications is only affecting mobile users or all users ?
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@Emad-R said in Testing Zulip:
I hated zulip for the same thing, sad to hear the Rocketchat. So push notifications is only affecting mobile users or all users ?
Mobile users. And all their info is fuzzy. They've not exposed metrics to know what you use, and they keep saying you have to register but even putting in quite a bit of time to do so, I can't find any registration information. Their forums are full of people complaining that there is no transparency, the limits are BS, and nothing works. But that's all the info I can find.
