Allison Groves

When I joined the Highrise team in May of 2016, the support team wasn’t a team at all: it was a single person. Chris did everything, from answering emails, to maintaining our help site, to recording how-to videos. Just the emotional output from being “on” empathetically all day every day can be exhausting, so I came along to help.

After a few months of me getting up to speed we realized that while there were certain times that it made sense for both of us to be helping users, like first thing in the morning, for a portion of the day one of us answering emails was sufficient. So we started asking ourselves, what was the best way for us to not only help our users and teammates, but to take care of ourselves as well?

As we started brainstorming the best way to accomplish that, we began by going through all of the other areas of Highrise we wanted to help contribute. The help site and all of it’s written and video content was always our responsibility, but we realized there were other ways we could help with the “extra” bandwidth we found ourselves with.

Onboarding emails for new users. Spending time coming up with and implementing different ways to build relationships with people. Writing more. Helping out with product testing and QA. And just generally being there for other teammates who could use an extra hand.

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Chris and I spent some time going through different ways we could divide our time. We settled on a time frame that would help us not only recuperate emotionally from being on, but enough “off” time to really dig into other projects and interests we have.

Any project that you really need to dig in and complete needs more than just a 3 hour chunk of your week.

What did we decide to do? A week on support, and a week off.

The week you are on the support inbox, that is your #1 priority. The expectation we set for users is that we’ll be here from 8am-5pm CST, so when you’re on the inbox, that’s what you cover. There’s still time to sneak other little things in there, but we pride ourselves on giving replying to customers as soon as we possibly can, so when you’re on, you’re on.

When you’re off the inbox, that’s the time to take care of bigger projects. It’s amazing to be able to write and tackle other things without having to constantly go back and check the inbox.

I personally use the time to take care of myself a little bit more too. It’s a great time to catch up on reading and learning, meeting up with users or colleagues to chat over coffee, even just taking a walk in the middle of the day to let the brain relax and think.

This system has worked incredibly well for us. Both Chris and I approach the job refreshed after a week “off”, and can give customers the best version of ourselves, which they wholeheartedly deserve.

We also get to scratch the other professional itches we have, while simultaneously helping our other teammates out as well.

Some may say that their inbox has a perpetual backlog, and they need all hands on deck at all times. Which is understandable, I personally have experienced that on many occasions. But even if your support team is 10+ people, finding room to start on a “small” version of this plan could pay off huge dividends.

If I knew I had every Wednesday afternoon off from the inbox to recharge my empathy batteries and tackle some other passion projects of mine, it completely shifts my mindset, and can very easily stave off burnout.

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Will we always work this way? Maybe not. We’re already exploring other options for seasonality, and things may change when a third person joins our team at some point in the future.

You may be hard pressed to find two people who care more about helping users than we do. However, to take care of others, we know we have to take care of ourselves first.

Oh, and what app do we use to help customers? Highrise, of course.

Maslow had it wrong. To get it right, we have to move social needs to the bottom of his pyramid.

-Matthew Lieberman (Professor of Social Cognitive Neuroscience at UCLA and author of the book Social)

Babies would die without their caregivers at birth. Study after study show the pain and ill we go through when we are isolated from others like us. As humans, we are wired to connect to one another.

However, instead of connecting, we seem to be heading the opposite direction. On the streets and in restaurants people are looking at their phones instead of the person right next to them.

Businesses strive to make everything quicker, faster, and automated. Sending automated welcome emails with generic information to everyone who signs up. Introducing artificial intelligence to weed through support inquiries instead of having someone read and respond to your query.

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It’s important to us here at Highrise to help people build great relationships. For many of our users, Highrise is an essential piece of that equation.

But what about us? How is our relationship with our users?

We try to make the welcome you get when signing up for Highrise a bit unique by changing the templates every day, asking people to chat, and a few other tweaks our CEO Nathan covers in detail here.

But we want to go even further. What else can we do?

Now, when you sign up for Highrise, you hear directly from me.

And by “directly from me”, I mean you see me, you hear me, and I address your individual needs based on what you’ve told us about you so far.

You get a personalized video.

I can't believe this is real. This is the most incredible onboarding I've ever seen from @highrise https://t.co/WEllIAgkGj

— Nate Berkopec (@nateberkopec) May 5, 2017

I personally greet you and ask you what you specifically need. And how we can help solve the problems you are having with your business.

The results so far have been really, really positive. And while making the human connection is the most important thing, we are hearing some really incredible feedback too.

First of all, holy crap. I’ve never gotten a video as a welcome message from a SaaS product before. I’m really impressed.

What an AWESOME email and video. Highrise is killin’ it! I really loved how personal this was.

Thanks Alison. I appreciate the thought and effort!

Hey Alison, that custom video for me was just mind blowing. Do you try to reach out to every customer that way? So impressed.

We are still a few weeks away from finding out whether or not these videos have an effect on our conversion rate. But one other huge factor is at play too: the memory of someone who cares. — Even if Highrise isn’t a good fit now, you may recommend us to friends, or even come back when the time is right. But most importantly, you might remember the human that took the time to make the connection with you.

As experts in helping people build great relationships, we keep learning too!

Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world Sheryl Sandberg

• 190 heads of state / 9 are women
• Of C-level jobs only 15% are women. Numbers haven’t changed since 2002 and it’s decreasing

It’s clear there’s a problem.

So two years ago, three very dear friends of mine formed a social enterprise company called Girls to the Moon, in hopes of hosting events and workshops to help young girls be their best selves, impact their communities, and create a more inclusive culture.

This year, we held our second annual “campference” in Nashville, for girls ages 10–14 with sessions covering all sorts of topics from puberty to positive body image to exploring black holes with an astrophysicist.

And it was packed. It was sold out and had a long waiting list. We can’t be more proud of the girls who attended and participated.

Just a tiny snag… planning was a huge burden given the demand. One of those “good problems to have” 🙂

With one of the co-founders running for office this year, I was asked to step in and help out as we planned the 2nd annual campference event. Last year, planning was done using different variations of Google Docs, but things were getting lost in the shuffle. And with four people now involved, context on communication with sponsors, speakers, and volunteers was paramount.

Enter Highrise.

Girls to the Moon all happens in our spare time. We all have full time jobs, so the amount of time we are able to spend on the campference and other events needs to be as focused, yet as asynchronous as possible.

When managing an event there are a lot of moving parts. 56 different people were involved in planning the campference.

What Highrise tools did we use to stay on top of that?

Tasks

The four of us were all responsible for different things. Courtney handled speakers and social marketing. Knight took care of our sponsors and other marketing tasks. Courtenay helped connect the dots with her context and connections, plus dealt with logistical things she had institutional knowledge on. I handled volunteers and venue logistics.

As you can see, a lot of moving parts.

An entire marketing and logistical plan was written out, then broken down into Highrise tasks. Every Sunday, we would get together to go through the previous week’s tasks, and assign new ones for the week to come. All tasks were marked “let everyone see this task” so we all had continual context, and could even follow up with each other.

People Contacts

What’s the best email address to use to reach Dr. Rager, who’s teaching our puberty session? What is our volunteer coordinator Lizzie’s Twitter handle? What session is Renee Burwell hosting?

Names, email addresses, physical addresses, social media information, and any custom data we needed to keep is stored in our contacts. We can also leave notes about people, keep files (like presentations!), and create fields for information specific to us, such as the name of the session someone was leading.

And contacts don’t even need to pertain to this year either. If someone expressed interest in speaking or volunteering but wasn’t able to join us for this particular event, they were added anyway and we used tags to identify them.

We have different volunteer tags in our Highrise account, one for volunteer, and one for 2016volunteer. Those marked volunteer we can go back to for future events and ask about their availability, we didn’t have to completely disregard them in a spreadsheet or other document because they weren’t available this time.

Dropbox Address

There is nothing worse than more than one person working with someone and not having context on the relationship. For example, Courtney was our main point of contact for speakers. She would then hand them off to me to talk logistics on the day, such as whether or not they had a slide deck to project during their session.

By forwarding all important email responses to Highrise via our own dropbox addresses, everyone could see the conversation history with each speaker, sponsor, and volunteer.

Deals

Sponsorships make events happen, and Deals were the perfect tool to keep track of them all. With Deals, each sponsorship opportunity could be marked as accepted (won), declined (lost), or pending, plus a value amount added to them.

Anything we needed to keep regarding that sponsorship could be kept there, like the contract we would send if they signed on for the event.

Broadcast

In Highrise, we had three segments of people we needed to communicate with: speakers, sponsors, and volunteers. They were tagged with their respective segments, and we could communicate with each group in bulk, instead of spending our time emailing each person individually.

This was especially helpful when seeking out volunteers. We had already started keeping contacts in Highrise who had expressed an interest in volunteering at the event, so when the time came to formally ask, we just had to send one easy email to all.

Cases

Any random files and notes we needed to keep about the event that weren’t associated with a specific person were kept in a Case. This meant that we actually had several places where information could live.

I specifically liked having all of our sponsor logos directly in the case, instead of digging through Google Drive to find them, they were right there. We also used the campference case to collect things like links and color specifics about the t-shirts we ordered.

Did We Need Other Tools?

The only outside tools we used were Slack to chat with each other, and the occasional Google Docs spreadsheet for things such as finances and time slot organization. Those spreadsheets could actually be linked directly to the Case we had set up for the campference, so all of our information was technically in the same place.

We also used Trello to “whiteboard” the sessions for the day. But 90% of the event was completely run in Highrise.

Having full context on all of those people who helped us make the event so special, plus specific spaces to accomplish major tasks meant we could all work in our own time yet still stay totally on top of the entire event. ‘

This year’s event sold out and got rave reviews:

Great day! Thanks for allowing DaysForGirls to be part of it. The girls put together 85 personal hygiene kits for distribution all over the world! — Cas Wucher

Looks like another success!! Look at all those inspired young women! …can’t wait till my girl is old enough to attend! Bravo to the GTTM Team for spreading such awesome waves of empowerment & leadership to the next generations — Meagan Norman Fowler

Looking forward to doing it all again with Highrise next year.

P.S. If you want to know more about Girls to the Moon and future events or opportunities, please signup for our newsletter here.