At BetterCloud, we take support seriously. In order to maintain a 99% customer satisfaction score and a 15-second first response time on chat, we need a process in place to make sure things run smoothly. When we rolled out chat, we ran into a problem that most lean support teams experience: People need breaks!

But what happens if half of your team takes a break at the same time? When we decided to offer chat as channel for support, we made a decision that to go all in.

A single minute of downtime on chat during support hours is unacceptable.

After around three years of offering chat support we haven’t missed a single chat during our business hours. We take these hours very seriously, if you think we’re kidding, check this out:

To ensure we're never understaffed on chat, we’ve created a Slack bot using Google Apps Script and the Zendesk Chat API. It’s simple, but effective. The Slack bot notifies our entire Support team every time a minute goes by where we don’t have enough people online.

The logic is simple:
Set the minimum number of users you’d like to be online during your Support hours. If the current time is within those hours and the number of users online is less than your defined minimum, ping the channel with an @here. Continue to ping this channel every minute until the number of users online meets your minimum.

If you’d like to set this up for your support team, make a copy of the sheet below and navigate to Tools > Script Editor for instructions. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out: michael.stone@bettercloud.com

Zendesk Chat Availability Checker