42:5 Support during the holidays

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to episode number five of the holiday season. My name is Lee and you are listening to Trailblazer FM. In this episode, we hear how our agencies manage client support during the holidays. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience I’ve had. Where, when you close down your computer for the last time before your break, there is still that feeling of anxiety. As you wonder, will anything go wrong whilst I’m away, will customers need to contact me? How will I reassure them? How will I be able to relax? In episode four, Tom Amos shared how he was doing client support from the toilet at his parents house. Be sure to check out that episode. So let’s learn from our agency owners and let’s start off with good old Tom.

Tom Amos:
Everyone lets their clients know they’re shut over Christmas. I’m pretty sure every agency does. We send out an email early December just to let everyone know that we’re shutting down, but we’re not giving up on them over holiday. So we do have contingency plans now. If I go back a few, maybe five, six years ago, we probably didn’t have any contingency plans. So a lot of things did happen, but it’s more important just to let your clients know that you’re not going to be available, but if there is an emergency to email support and you’ll get back to them as and when you can, which is what we do, or we have a support line that goes to voicemail so they can leave a voicemail. And I will check in periodically, obviously not when I’m with my family, but just to make sure that there’s no emergencies that need to be dealt with or no fires to put out.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Tom has shared here, the importance of setting expectations way in advance and ensuring that clients understand how things are going to play out. Chantal too ensures that her clients understand the communication process during time off.

Chantal Edouard-Betsy:
So I’m fortunate that most of my clients also take a lot of down time at the end of the year. So for all intents and purposes, we wind things down pretty much completely. But my VAs do keep on in my inbox and they check on anything urgent. And because most of my clients are actually friends. I normally have them on telegram anyway. So if there’s ever any emergencies, they just pop me a telegram message. And I sort of check that once a day, but generally speaking, it’s pretty quiet this side over the festive season.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. When you say telegram, it makes me think of the old fashioned telegrams-

Chantal Edouard-Betsy:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
… That they used to send on a little slip of paper. And you had so many characters, didn’t you? Neither of us are that old-

Chantal Edouard-Betsy:
No.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
For the record. Ali Green and her team recognise that trying to accommodate people last minute before the holidays doesn’t necessarily end well. Here’s how they purposefully prepare for the holiday season. And if I say so myself an exceptionally genius idea for a support email address, you probably shouldn’t set up.

Ali Green:
Well, we do try to protect our personal time. And over the years when we’ve had clients knocking down the door, Christmas week, asking for a deliverable by the end of the week, and we try to accommodate, we realise that we just make ourselves more upset than need be.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.

Ali Green:
We’re trying to accommodate those requests. So now the team does get the last two weeks of the year, essentially off. And we will promote that on social media and through our email, we’ll let them know that we’re not scheduling any calls, taking any client meetings. We will keep an eye on our email to make sure there’s no emergencies, but there will be no project starting, ending, happening, progressing during those two week. And I mean, we do have support, we obviously manage, we manage 150 websites, so it’s kind of hard to completely turn off. So we’ve worked hard to train our clients. Well, we have an email address specifically that goes to our help desk support@greenmelonmedia.com, and that email can be navigated to anybody on the team so we can kind of take turns monitoring it so that not everybody is on all holiday break. Make sure that anytime sensitive emergencies do get tended to, but nobody feels like that they’re having to work through the entire two weeks of Christmas.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I guess another way as well, folks is you could create an email address just for Christmas or just for the holiday season, which says, reallyyoureallywanttosendthis@yourcompany.com.

Ali Green:
That would be genius. Think, thinktwice@yourcompany.com

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Think of the children…

Ali Green:
Think of the children…

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Kill everyone.

Ali Green:
Oh, I’m going to use that one this year. I like that a lot.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Travis shares that managing client support has been a learning process over the last few years and even confesses, like I think many as owner operators to breaking his own rules now and again.

Travis Buck:
Man, this is such a good question too, for like early agency honours.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.

Travis Buck:
One of my employees recently summed up how our company views client support during the holidays. He said, people who send out work emails on Christmas are the problem with this world. So yeah, that’s like evolved in our company. So I know we’re going to get emails. We have a no answer policy on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s day, we still get the emails. We don’t answer. We’re able to get away with not answering requests because we clearly communicate with our clients early in the holiday season and we let them know there’ll be limited support on these days, half the battle is like dealing with clients, setting expectations correctly, which I didn’t learn for a lot of years in early agency. I learned that later on.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.

Travis Buck:
We also have a trouble ticket system that auto responds to let people know we receive their email. The auto responder is nice because it lets them know that this is a holiday. Someone will look at the issue. Usually the response reassures client and is enough to make them feel like their request is getting looked after.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.

Travis Buck:
While I’m pretty strict about not letting my employees work on the holiday. I’m always guilty of breaking that no answer policy. I’m the one, I’ll be checking my email. I’ll try to restrain myself from-

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.

Travis Buck:
… Answering unless the client looks like they’re in real trouble, like the website gets hacked or something. But in my mind, I know like nobody’s ever died from a website that stopped working.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
When chatting with Michael MacGinty, he impressed on me the importance of preparation, especially for clients who are on a support contract, ensuring their websites are up to date and are secured. A well maintained website shouldn’t really be causing many, if any problems during your time off.

Michael MacGinty:
We try not to have clients who need support. So we apply all the updates on all our websites for all the clients who are on website support. And that makes pretty sure that we’re not going to get any calls. If somebody does call, yes, we will respond to them. But to be honest, if we’ve done the job that they’re paying us to do, then they shouldn’t have any problem over Christmas because we’ve done all the updates and we’ve checked everything is working. We shouldn’t have any issues. So if we do, if there is a problem, obviously we will put our hand up, but we try only to work with sites where we’re not going to get called right at Christmas. And we don’t take people seriously when they contact us and they’re not on a support plan. And they say, I’ve got an issue with this website. You built four years ago and it doesn’t look right on a Samsung Galaxy, whatever. So they just get told, we’ll get back to you within three working days with a response, not even a fix, just a response.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely. And folks, if you listen to last week’s episode, Michael shared his ghost of Christmas past and share some excellent wisdom in there, especially for newer agencies. It’s a mistake that I made myself. If we could sum up some of the key lessons from this episode, Nicole Osborne does it beautifully well.

Nicole Osborne:
If my aim is we business owner is to have some time out. I need to really prepare everything in advance. Oh my God. Now I sound a bit German. I do think planning and early communication is really key. I plan in advance, how I’m going to handle it. And then I let my clients know really early. And I would imagine as a website agency owner, don’t leave it to a last minute to consider, oh my God, what might be going wrong with their website over a holiday season?

Nicole Osborne:
So do this already in November, have a chat with them, prepare them that perhaps you would off for two weeks. This is what we can do. If there is any emergencies and then for yourself as, and hopefully there will be no emergencies because obviously everyone is on amazing maintenance packages. But then as yourself, as the agency owners, have some dedicated times where you do check in so that you’re not worried about it, but yeah. Be organised and stick to your time schedule and communicate early. So I’m definitely going to take off time over Christmas. All my Wunderstars already know about that so that they can also think, okay, what have you got to say anything urgent. Let’s resolve it now before it’s for holiday season, because we all deserve some time off.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Over the years. My business partner, Tim and I have learned the hard way that you really do need to prepare for the holiday season. And for any holiday that a team member may be having. Our process, at least for the Christmas break is to ensure we understand which people will be monitoring the support desk for each and every day that the office is closed. We try and be really fair about it too, ensuring that nobody has more than two days each across the entire team. We also make sure that they will only be checking the support desk at some specific times in the day no more and no less. We also inform all of our clients that we are running a skeleton team so they can understand that whilst we are available, but will only be dealing with emergencies and any ticket that can, will be postponed into the New year and dealt with then.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Throughout the year for our individual time off, we will work on a handover document. This means that all of my team members know and understand everything that I’ve been working on and what may need to happen whilst I’m away. I’ll also ensure that any client I am working with understands that I’m away and who they are to speak with. If they have any issues or need to progress a project in my absence.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And just to state the bleeding obvious, don’t forget to put on your out of office reply. So folks, how do you manage client support during the holidays, head on over to trailblazer.fm, come and join us on this episodes’ comments page. Link is in the show notes. Once again, thank you to Cloudways for sponsoring season 42. I’ll say it again. They are the platform that we trust with all of our mission critical websites, good support for us is essential. And knowing that we can lean on the team at Cloudways as an extension of our team, especially during the holiday season is absolutely essential to our peace of mind, get more information and a free trial over at trailblazer.fm/cloudways. In the next episode, our agency share how they wind down before the holidays. If we don’t see you in the comment section, then let’s see you in the next episode.