How We Serve Our Prospects While Working a 4-Day Work Week

Like the rest of the Buffer team, our advocacy team was delighted when we first experimented with a four-day work week in May 2020. What was unique to this team, however, was that the success of a four-day work was a little suspicious of a week for a customer-focused team.

As a company, Buffer has always set a high bar for customer support. Our goal is to provide fast, personal, and informed customer support responses 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We also assign a lawyer to each ticket so that every customer with us gets a sense of continuity. The thing about advocacy is that even if we work one day less per week, the incoming ticket volume remains largely unchanged.

So how are we going to set the bar high when we work a four-day work week?

We tried different setups and are very happy with our landing. Here is exactly the system that we currently use for a four-day week for our customer advocacy team, along with a transparent view of our team goals and metrics from last year, in which we have a four-day week .

How advocacy is set up for a 4 day work week

Over the years the advocacy team has made several different rounds of Summer on Fridayswhere our teammates took part in half a day on Fridays for a month in the summer. We learned a lot from this, so that we already had a framework for the challenges and opportunities at the beginning of the four-day week.

In general, a shorter work week is a great opportunity for the advocacy team to learn and grow in several areas:

• communication: For a four-day week, we need excellent communication with a focus on asynchronous communication.
• Knowledge management: We have already put a lot of effort into sharing knowledge and documenting our processes and this is another chance to improve that.
• Experiment with time management: It is an opportunity to explore how we can work more efficiently every day and better manage our energy.
• Set individual goals: This was a great opportunity to rethink individual goals and give the team clear goals to work towards.

Where we started with the four-day week

When the entire Buffer team started working on four-day workweek, we gave each team at Buffer the freedom to choose which day of the week to start. The whole company was usually divided into two camps: Wednesdays or Fridays.

We already knew that it would not work for us in the advocacy team to choose a uniform day every week, as we have to be available to our customers seven days a week. Every day that no lawyers are working, the volume of tickets increases and customers don’t get any responses. There is also a chance that we may miss a bug or problem with the Buffer product being sent through the inbox.

We knew from the start that we would need different days off for different team members. At first we switched days off so that teammates had a different day off each week, but there were always some teammates online. We did this for the first month and it wasn’t a popular option. First, it took far too much administrative work to set this schedule; Second, it was difficult for lawyers to plan anything when the day they were offline kept changing.

The system that works for our team

The schedule we have now is the schedule we landed on in July 2020, three months after the four-day week was introduced. We asked the team members about their preferences for a day off and tried to follow them as much as possible. Most people have chosen to have Friday off, some prefer Monday, and a smaller group starts on Wednesdays. Now it’s consistent every week so we know exactly who will be online each day of the week.

An important part of this system for us was setting it up so that most of the people on the team could take three days off in a row. This work structure – four days off, three days off – can be really filling, and that’s what we wanted for our team members.

Plus, having a random day off in the middle of the week can make it difficult to have a continuous conversation with a customer. We created the schedule with that in mind, although we have some team members who value taking Wednesdays off and we support that. For the majority of the team, however, Monday or Friday is free.

How we manage weekends

As you can see in the table above, we also have customer support on the weekends. We’ve been doing this since the beginning of Buffer, and we hire a few people specifically for weekend shifts. By default, they work on one of the weekend days rather than both, so they have a weekend day off. The exception is that a teammate prefers to work from Friday to Monday and Tuesday to Thursday off.

For those who take weekend shifts, we are still optimizing three days in a row to take advantage of that extra peace of mind and to maintain communication with customers.

Goals and key figures and the 4-day work week

Generally, we set goals and measure our inbound volume over seven days, rather than the four each teammate is working on. The challenge for us is to make sure we are just as productive with this new schedule over those seven days. In all fairness we struggled with it for the first six months; We did our best, but we had no clear goals and no clear expectations for increased productivity.

This year we have formulated our goals much more clearly, in particular the number of ticket numbers to be reached within four days. This clarity means that teammates can meet our response time goals and continue to work a four-day week. As with other teams at Buffer, advocates have the option to work part or all of the fifth day of the week if they feel they may not be able to accomplish what they set out to do in a given week . We call this fifth day an “overflow day”.

A look at our goals and how they have developed

Our two main goals for the advocacy team have always been our customer response time and individual ticket goals (how many tickets an attorney handles in a day). These goals were based on realistic goals for the team and the level of each individual.

In the first quarter of 2020 (before we had a four-day week), our goal was to answer customer emails within six hours. We also had individual ticket targets based on daily volume. When we switched to four-day workweek in Q2 2020, we implemented new goals for tickets per day, but we didn’t tie them to the customer experience we wanted to offer or based on achieving the same performance in set four days instead of five.

In the end, we upgraded our business hours for offering customer support. When we began our experiment with a 4-day work week, our business hours were Monday at 3 p.m. ET through Fridays at 8 p.m. ET – that is, 24 hours a day during the work week. In order to create more consistent expectations for our customers, we’ve changed our hours of operation Monday through Friday to 6:00 am to 8:00 pm ET every day.

Now in 2021, we have set ambitious OKRs (Goals and Key Results) at the company and team level for customer response times and overall service experience. It’s important to us that we don’t sacrifice the customer experience for efficiency. We aimed for an initial response time of two hours and subsequent responses within seven hours (for e-mail tickets).

A few results so far in the first quarter of 2021:

• Our customer satisfaction score increased from 92.3% in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 94% this quarter.
• We achieved our goal of an initial response time of two hours with a median of 1.6 hours during business hours.
• Our team sent 71% of the second responses within seven hours (our goal was 90%).

We have also standardized our team goals for the ticket responses sent per week (148-170 tickets) and the ticket quality we expect from each individual. These goals ensure a level of performance that we need to achieve our goals while also being able to take the fifth day off.

Farewell Thoughts

We pride ourselves on having improved our customer response times and experience in 2021 while having a four day working week. Even so, we know that there is still room for development, what a four-day week looks like for our team.

Reducing available hours on a global team means we are sometimes a little scarce when affected by external factors like third-party downtime or issues with APIs. While we might be able to handle the same number of tickets in four days as we did in five days, it is always beneficial to be available on specific days and times within the world of customer support.

As a team, we continue to discuss how we can be a little more flexible in terms of coverage in our strategy for the future.

Do you work on a customer support team with four day workweek? Or do you have further questions about how to approach a four-day week? Write us a tweet! Maybe you just hear from one of our customer advisors.

Photo of Tim Mossholder At Unsplash