The holidays are just around the corner, and we’re planning to make sure our customers feel supported while giving our team time to recharge. Over the years, we’ve learned how important it is to set expectations with our customers early about how we’re managing support over the holidays. Here’s how we’re approaching it:

1. Setting Expectations Early

We’ll communicate our holiday support hours and response times to our customers over email and Slack broadcasts. In these comms, it’s important to give our customers guidance on how to escalate urgent issues – so no P0 goes unaddressed over the holidays. 

2. On-Call Support for P0s 

As always, we’ll operate a support rota over the holidays with dedicated members of the team on call to handle high-priority issues. We’ll utilize workflow rules to automatically route urgent P0s to the right people, notifying them immediately over Slack. Having a well organized on-call schedule means we’ve got the necessary coverage, without overloading anyone during their time off.

3. Automating Our Workflow Where Possible

We'll do some work to update our auto-responses, so we can set expectations on response times immediately when a customer reaches out. We’ve learned over time that it’s important to add conditions to auto-responses, so they match our Tiers and SLAs. Our auto-responses this holiday season will contain: a note of acknowledgement, an expected response time, and links to helpful resources (including paths to escalation where necessary). 

4. Let the non P0s take more time 

One thing that’s really hard to let go of for us is being OK with not providing the same level of response during the holidays. We’ll keep our SLAs and have avenues for escalation of P0 issues, but we’re (trying to be) OK with letting non P0s take more time. 

5. Making Sure Our Playbooks Are Up To Date 

We’ve got playbooks of all our common support scenarios – so our on-call support team can handle requests without needing to loop in team members who aren’t on call that day. Our playbooks always include links to relevant threads for reference on how the issue was solved previously, steps to take to solve the issue, and how to test that it's actually fixed before getting back to the customer.

6. Post-Holiday Retro

Once the holiday season wraps up, we’ll evaluate how things went. We’ll review support load and response times so we can plan even better for the next holiday season, gather feedback from the team on how our approach felt, and find areas for improvement. A huge thing for us is always celebrating the team’s efforts – we know how much work goes into giving our customers the best support we possibly can, and it's something we really pride ourselves on.