#173: Reducing the support workload with Ed Freyfogle

@freyfogle is back! We talk about Ed’s systematic attempt to reduce his support workload.

This episode is also on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YnhAH9_OSRg

Listen, subscribe and download here.

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I’m enjoying these ones as I’m on a similar mission to reduce admin myself.

Some thoughts I had for @freyfogle whilst listening

You can (and I have) hire support people who will work for multiple companies. Meaning you can get coverage all day long but only pay for the time you use. Not all part time support people want that but you can find them quite easily I think (I know one other person who has this arrangement)

German language skills seems like something you can hire for easily enough. You’re going to want good English anyway I’d assume so likely hiring in a comparatively expensive location anyway. However, we get support requests in Spanish and Portuguese and just handle these with Google translate. That seems to be acceptable

If you use helpscout (or etc) you can set auto replies based on keywords. Ie “it looks like you are looking for your invoices, have you tried…” I never did that but you could…

On the invoices, we get quite a few of those as well. The saved reply we have goes something like “we’ve resent your latest invoice. That will come from , do check your spam folder of you don’t see it.” Getting them to pull it from the down folder hopefully means they get future ones. And if they are not the person we are sending them to we offer to change that.

I started using helpscout once I knew I would hire a support person. That let me build up some history they could see. Saved replies are more useful than I thought they would be, even for short ones.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve thought of all that but wanted to mention some of my experience in case it was useful

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