So today was a first for me in my support role. I started my shift bright and early this morning and everything was moving slow. Tim and Lauren went off to a meeting and Jim is traveling this week for a conference, so I was by handling support on my own for a short period of time, but this was a normal thing. I felt confident that I could handle each support request that came through and if I didn’t Tim and Lauren would be back by lunchtime and I could ask my questions then. I was completely unprepared for what would commence in the next hour.
A lot of schools are still getting up and running with their semester and that means a ton of sign-ups on our Shared Hosting at Reclaim. This September we had 721 new sign-ups on Shared Hosting. So we knew that things could get a little hairy on days where classes were signing up, like today.
Support was very quiet when all of a sudden the Slack channel for support started going crazy. I checked to see what was going on and a class was having trouble with their signups. Over the course of the next 15-30, I answered about 30 tickets trying to help the students. That’s about Reclaim’s daily average. We get anywhere from 20-40 tickets a day, during working hours. To say I was overwhelmed by this point was an understatement. I had never experienced something like this while I was completely by myself on support.
After a deep breath, I was off. Luckily, I knew how to solve the problems from WHMCS on our admin side so the fix was easy but very time consuming because of a number of tickets that were submitted.
After Lauren and Tim came back from their meeting I explained what was going on. I had most of the tickets solved by this point, there were only a few left that came in during the ordeal but were unrelated to the problem at hand. I was talking with Lauren about this afterward and she gave me some great advice for a time like this, to compartmentalize things, don’t let the emotion overtake you, and just work on each of them one by one.
Today was such a great learning experience. Even though I was completely overwhelmed, and at first didn’t know where to start, I was able to answer every ticket successfully. And without this experience, I wouldn’t have had that conversation with Lauren and know where I can improve when this happens again (and I hope it doesn’t). I know things can change from one day to the next and some days can be slow for support than others but, I was not expecting today to be one of the busier days. But that’s okay, I’ll take them in stride and learn from the experiences.
Featured image: by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
That GIF is perfect. Omg. Trial by fire, baby!
Some of my best learning is done when I’m only able to use personal resources, so it’s not all bad. 😉 Congrats on handling it with grace!
I’ll tell you, if you were rattled, it did not show. You seemed cool as a cucumber on Slack. I was very impressed, keeping your wits about you when stuff explodes is crucial, and you did that and more. You rule!