The four-day workweek trial that's threatening our customer support

I've found that tweaking our auto-response emails to set clear expectations on response times has helped manage customer expectations. We've also started using Freshdesk to prioritize and route tickets more efficiently, which has reduced the workload on Fridays when we're short-staffed.

I think you're trying to cram a 5-day workload into 4 days which is unrealistic, we've seen this with our own trial at Smith & Co where we had to hire extra staff to cover the shortfall.

We've found that using a chatbot like ManyChat to handle initial customer queries on Fridays has taken some pressure off our support team, and around 30% of issues get resolved without needing human intervention.

From a budgeting perspective I am getting a bit concerned about the potential impact on our customer retention numbers, we have a significant investment in customer acquisition and if our support team cannot keep up with demand it could hit our revenue. Our financial models are based on a certain level of customer satisfaction and if that drops we cannot absorb the loss, I've seen it happen to other companies like Amazon who have tried similar experiments. I think we need to take a closer look at the costs associated with implementing a four-day workweek, including the potential cost of losing customers, before we decide whether to continue with the trial.

I made a similar mistake when we first introduced flexible hours, assuming our support team could just absorb the workload. What really helped us was implementing a system like Zendesk to track and manage customer requests, so we can see where the bottlenecks are and allocate resources accordingly.

Honestly, I think you need to reassess your staffing levels, do you think hiring a few more part-time staff to cover Fridays would be a viable solution?

I've tried using a shared inbox tool like Front to distribute customer emails among the team, but it just ended up causing more confusion and overlapping responses. We couldn't get the tagging system to work properly, and it was a nightmare to keep track of who was working on what.

Given that you've had six months to adjust, I'm surprised you're still seeing such a significant impact on customer support, are you considering using some of the cost savings from the four-day week to invest in tools like Zendesk to help streamline your support processes?