231: Fireside with Ash Rhodes

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 231 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Ash Rhodes for a Fireside Chat. I'd like to welcome back to the podcast today, Ash Rhodes. Ash, lovely to have you back for another Fireside. And um, we had a little pre-chat on this topic, and we decided to stop talking because I think we both have a lot to say on this. And I'm I'm super good. Let's hope we can we can tell everyone again what we were just talking about. But but this is a topic that we both have quite strong feelings on, and I'm really excited to have a proper recorded conversation with you for the benefit of our listeners. So welcome back. Yeah.

Ash Rhodes: 1:04

Yes, and and by strong feelings, of course, you mean that I have all the right ones and you have all the wrong ones. I mean, naturally.

Charlotte Ward: 1:11

That's exactly what I mean that I have all the right ones and you have all the wrong ones.

Ash Rhodes: 1:16

Exactly. Um, indeed. And what I believe Charlotte is talking about is uh the topic of time tracking amongst employees. What is too much? What is too little? Any at all? Um, do we just all just start getting together to work and nobody tracks anything? Uh and you know, what? What is the right amount? What should we be doing? So on and so forth. Is am I getting anywhere close to the mark?

Charlotte Ward: 1:51

Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm like, I think I should just lay my cards on the table. And that is to say straight out the bat that I'm a huge advocate, particularly in certain circumstances for time tracking, um, particularly among you know certain types of work, certain types of teams, certain types of organization. And somewhat controversially, perhaps I think it's particularly advantageous in a remote environment. And I say that as someone who's been remote for a really long time and fundamentally believes in the trust that you should place in a remote team. But we'll we'll dig into all of the reasons why I think time tracking is good. What do you think of it?

Ash Rhodes: 2:31

And I I hear you. I do understand the need to under to to have a holistic understanding of what your employees are doing and so on, even if you do trust them. However, um, I come in more from a uh it's a waste of so many people's times, far beyond your own. Um, and I hate it. I find it a chore for everybody. And if there is absolutely any of the other solution beyond the just very just I can't even think of the word uh slog of tracking. Um before we started recording, um, you mentioned down to the 30-second um uh uh task. Uh I was just uh working as a uh contractor, and um I found it just awful tracking tasks down to the 15 minute, and I thought that was uh the worst waste of my day I could even imagine. Um, I don't want to do that, and I don't want to make my employees do that. So that's where I come in, come down on the topic.

Charlotte Ward: 3:54

So I mean we could stop the conversation there and say, you know, never the twain will meet, right? You you think one thing I think and we're done. That was easy. But let's actually unpack it a bit more now. Everyone knows where we stand. Yes, this is it. We're gonna discuss this civilly. I promise no fisticuffs at this point.

Ash Rhodes: 4:14

If nothing else, I my arms are long, but I can't quite reach to Britain.

Charlotte Ward: 4:18

Yeah, very true, very true. Um, so well, we'll just have to pick that up when we're next, somewhere in person. And uh yeah. Um, in the meantime, in the meantime, um I have had experience of time tracking both as a support agent, engineer, consultant myself. So working working in the queue, I've time tracked, and I have implemented time tracking as a leader twice. Um, and um I was surprised how as a leader willing I was, and this is a ridiculous thing to say, but how willing I was put your reps through it? To put my reps through it, knowing the hell I went through myself when as a frontline um agent I was asked to do it. I um and but I think what I will say is although I found myself surprised at the idea of uh the first time I did it, that you know, I I actually realized the value of it as a as a leader. I was surprised how willing I was to put my team through it. The advantage of having been through it myself as a frontline agent um brought to me like the perspective, I knew what to expect. I knew the feelings that my team would have when I asked them to time trap. I knew all the attached trigger warnings that I should try and kind of cover in rolling this out. And um and consequently, I think having done it and understood the fears involved and the concerns and the um the burden for sure, um it did enable me twice to roll out time tracking very successfully and to get huge benefits from it as a leader. So I'll lay that out there as an initial, an initial thing, which it which is an initial kind of discussion point, if you like, which is um the sell, right? The sell to a to a frontline team is is quite hard. What's your take on that? Have you ever had to sell, like have you ever had to had to implement it as a leader yourself?

Ash Rhodes: 6:38

I have I full disclosure, I have been asked to implement it and I have pushed back successfully. So I have never had that tool available to me as a leader, but it's because I did not because I rejected it. It's because I made that choice that I did not I I had had to do it as I basically I was in your position, and I said I hated doing it. I found it to be something that um I I found unpleasant and impactful to my day and impactful to um honestly my feeling of self-worth as a rep. And um because it it made me feel like I was not trusted to do my work in the ways in which I I wanted to. And no matter how much like a leader might tell me that this isn't to be being used to um uh judge that you are doing sufficient work and so on, great, that leader may not. But what happens if that leader leaves? Is the next one going to, or the one after, or the one above him? Because what if a CEO starts reviewing it and is like, well, Representative Jim over here isn't pulling his weight sufficiently because he was five minutes late coming back from his lunch. So F that dude, he's out, and like there's always someone who can override your decisions as a leader. So I I chose to not create these tools that could be misused outside of my hands, and and I'm not saying that you made poor decisions, I'm saying that I wanted to make sure that there those tools were not available for other people to misuse.

Charlotte Ward: 8:45

I'm I'm completely fine with you thinking that I made a poor decision because I'm gonna convince you otherwise. I'm gonna I'm gonna completely convince you otherwise by the end of this conversation. Maybe I will. Well, I'm gonna try anyway. At the very least, I can tell you uh some of the benefits that I've um and and I I want to hear them.

Ash Rhodes: 9:04

I I you and I have spoken briefly about it before, and um and and don't get me wrong, like I the amount of granular, like I love data. I'm I'm not data-driven in like by default, but when I start seeing all this data and what you can do with it, because I I always consider um hiring forecasting to be a special kind of black magic, and I can go in and do uh keeping that metaphor going, like super apprentice level black magic. But if I have the kind of data that you have, because you have this stuff, I can graduate to, you know, petty petty dabbler or even master level black magic, but I'm still just always vaguely guessing. Um, and I think that it's it's good guesses because I know what we've done in previous years and like how many tickets we've got coming in, and so on. But if I have a really strong knowledge of what my reps are doing all day, every day, that's all the better. But I don't I don't have that. You have that missing puzzle piece. And I recognize, and I I do recognize that I don't have that, and I could, but it's that trade-off that we always have as leaders because we're not like and we'll always have there's other things that we trade off as well, it's not just this. Does that make sense?

Charlotte Ward: 10:39

Yeah, it does, it does, it does make sense. Um and and I think you know, I will um prefix everything that I say in this discussion with with the um with the notion that uh I understand everything you just said in terms of basing your knowledge of what your team are doing on what they have done historically. And I think that that is great and wonderful. And if you have that predictability and that consistency, then there's a very big chance you don't need time tracking. And so I'm I'm absolutely on board with that. I would not ask somebody who was doing piecework, you know, who's doing the same thing and in a predictable way, it you same similar unit-sized chunks, the same every day. There is no point in creating the same pattern of time tracking every day. Um, where I think it is hugely beneficial and has been um transformative in the in the way I can lead a team is when the environment is complex, when people are doing different things within the same team, but ultimately all contributing to the support ecosystem that our customers experience. Um when the when a ticket is not a ticket is not a ticket, you know, every ticket is different. Yeah, go for it. Go ahead.

Ash Rhodes: 12:15

I just just for clarification, are you when you say different things, do you mean different, like in your case, different reps doing different the same rep doing different tasks, different reps having different tasks? What are you what do you think in this case?

Charlotte Ward: 12:34

So if you were to look at the the work streams, the work types, they they are quite different, they're handled differently, they're measured differently, they're they're managed differently. Um the unit of work for any of those work streams is different.

Ash Rhodes: 12:52

It's kind of yeah, yeah, and sometimes it can be a ton of sense. Absolutely.

Charlotte Ward: 12:57

And and also, and also like um different reps are specializing in one or or or a small number of work streams, or or the time zone or the day of the week that reps are working is different and it makes the pattern of their day entirely different.

Ash Rhodes: 13:15

Yeah, it's gonna be be a huge difference in like if most of your uh customers are, you know, East Coast US, and you've got people in Europe who are doing like why are they only doing five tickets and these other people are doing things well because there's different traffic, yeah, exactly.

Charlotte Ward: 13:36

It's different traffic, but that but they still have a full-time.

Ash Rhodes: 13:39

You're still doing different work. Well, but it just means the work type is different.

Charlotte Ward: 13:43

Exactly. So so for me at the moment where I am now, the the extreme of that is that some of my team work APAC hours when it's really, really off peak for us. And that's when we do our rollouts and our new releases because we're doing effectively um we're maintaining customers uh on the latest releases of our platform, customer by customer, because it's a private SaaS platform. So this is going into customers' clouds at the other end, 12 hours in the other direction. Um, that sort of when East Coast US hits, it's ticket traffic, it's customers talking to other people on my team, and it's Zen desk work. And and those two days are very different, but they all contribute to how we serve our customers. So I need to understand it as a whole in order to understand how much of one thing we're doing, where the weight is, when it's happening, and what the shape of that whole ecosystem looks like.

Ash Rhodes: 14:43

So I understand why you might want to set up like a pilot program for uh right at the beginning, when especially if you just come into a uh a particular org, especially one so complicated as your own, um, to get that baseline and figure out for each different time zone, sub team, so on and so forth, to figure out what each individual person position, et cetera, should be performing at. Um again, I understand what these decisions should be, etc. Setting up something that is an ongoing thing, it I think, if nothing else, uh where my hesitation, where my squeamishness comes in, so on, is like the impact on uh employee time comes in. Because I mean, it doesn't matter how quick somebody is, it takes time, it it impacts like it can impact employee morale. Like if there, if people are just like, uh, I just I got stuck up on this ticket, or I got stuck up like waiting on a response or something like that. I I get that I I'm not technically held on these specific metrics, but I feel like I am, and so on. It can really have t we all know like that's human nature, and to have it like sit there, a ticking clock where it's like this week I spent 14 hours doing X, and norm my normal is four. Like it just it it feels like there's there that it feels like a um not even feels I know for a fact because I have been there, there is a cost in employee morale, and um if we don't see that, then it's because we are forgetting what it's like to be an employee, uh, an individual contributor. And so that's that's my concern about it.

Charlotte Ward: 17:07

Yeah, I and I do I do understand that. Um it is a burden. I'm not kidding myself there. It is a burden. Um and I can like fully and honestly say that one way to give yourself unnecessary challenge as a new leader in a new organization is to do what I did in this organization, which is three weeks in, to say, guys, I need you to track time. Not a great start, honestly. But like there were some difficult conversations because you know, because of all of the things that you just said, it's uh it could be seen to be a lack of trust, it could be seen to be uh extra burden, it could be seen to be an opportunity to measure performance or productivity. Um, so and and I will I will uh first the first thing I'll say is that um the reason I did it so quickly, and I knew it would be a bumpy ride. I did know that. I wasn't that line, you know, I did know that. Um but the reason that I asked my new team back when I joined to do this so quickly was because the work was so complex, and I recognized in those first three weeks that there was not a hope in hell that I could help them and and you know help them understand where we needed to make things better because they were it was a it was a tough, it's a tough job, you know, it's still a tough job. Um, any support role is a tough job, actually. But um but in a complex environment, as a new leader, you're you've been brought in to make things better. And if you can't even understand it, then how can you make things better? And yeah, and so so the this the message that I had to spend some time reinforcing with the team was one of this very much is not about metrics for metrics' sake, it's metrics for understanding. And I gave and it and so I was very transparent with it right from the start. Everybody could see everybody's time tracking. Um, everybody understood, um, or at least I took tried to take them on the journey of understanding that if we can all see each other's, then there are no secrets. And if we can all see each other's, then the conversations we have are about the data as a whole and never about an individual. Um, and uh and any conversation I had about data from that came from time tracking, I shared with the team as well. And it wasn't easy, but you know, you get to a point where once you begin to see, and I think this is the this is the single thing that um transforms the approach from a place of like mistrust and fear and burden to engagement with the process is if you can get a win from it, if you're able to tell a different narrative, or if you're able to enact an improvement that is for the benefit of the whole team, and that it could only have happened because of what they did for you.

Ash Rhodes: 20:43

Well, or and and indeed from the tracking itself.

Charlotte Ward: 20:48

That yeah, that's what I mean.

Ash Rhodes: 20:50

Yeah, got it.

Charlotte Ward: 20:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ash Rhodes: 20:52

Um, and that is you, I mean, I know you we've been friends for a long time, and I I personally would know that you would were doing this specifically so that you could um be trying to get them the right number of co-workers and and so on. Um, of course, they had would have no background and so on. So you have to earn that trust. Um but I would assume that, in fact, I I know from from this story that that was uh almost immediate from after you were able to do the the tracking for a reasonable amount of time. You were able to say, okay, look at how understaffed they are to the tune of what, like two or three reps or something insane like that.

Charlotte Ward: 21:51

Yeah.

Ash Rhodes: 21:51

And I mean, there are other ways to do it. You can go and throw yourself in and get to know the job. And as a frontline rep, And then just be like, okay, and this person is doing X number of tickets, and like that's this person is an overachiever, and this person is an underachiever. And so like there's other there are ways to do it. It's just very, very difficult. All all of there's no easy way to do it, I guess. Yeah.

Charlotte Ward: 22:22

Um there's not, it's a bumpy ride. And but I will say, you know, we've been doing this at this organization for nearly two years, a year and three quarters now. And um in that year and three quarters.

Ash Rhodes: 22:35

Wow, two years.

Charlotte Ward: 22:36

In in yeah, three near pushing two years, yeah. Um, and in that time, I have never ever once compared one individual's time tracking to another individual's time tracking.

Ash Rhodes: 22:47

I'm so proud of you to hear that. That's great.

Charlotte Ward: 22:49

I have I have only ever looked at the whole team. Um, and and similarly, they look at their own data. Um, and and something that you you said there, um, what was it? Just struck me about the um you know, that sort of understanding this was it, this is it, you know, being able to tell the narrative of this team is actually understaffed by this factor. Um I would have found impossible without this time tracking, because I think the same is true of most support teams. Most support teams are like sponges, like you know, if you you can we we soak up a lot from the organization, don't we? I uh any organization that's ever been in, yes. There's it like it's always like, yeah, we'll give that support can take on that feature, support can take on that work stream, support can take on this channel, support can take on this kind of, you know, yes, it can provide support to the community as well, or or or whatever. Like, there's always just stuff being given to support to do, and then forgotten, and then forgotten just quietly continues doing it. Yep, and eventually, you know, it does become too much, but it becomes the kind of you know, if you have kind of a bag and you just keep stuffing the boiling water type of thing, where it just you don't even realize how much work you are doing, yeah, that is so far outside of the realm of support.

Ash Rhodes: 24:25

Like, why why why are you taking notes? Why are you the note taker for the dev meetings? Yes, yeah, it makes sense because you want the dev notes to be in readily available and understandable English, but also why? Like why?

Charlotte Ward: 24:47

It's just yeah, and and other things like mobile and yeah, exactly, and and other things similarly. Why, you know, why am I spending so much time at the start of the day reading emails? Or why am I, you know, what is that thing? And and it's it's the single simplest power time tracking gives you is knowledge and understand, which seems like a really seems like a really uh obvious thing to say, but that knowledge actually is really empowering. And if you are transparent about it and your team engages with it, you take them on that journey with you, and you are able very quickly to get uh you know some positive effect from that knowledge, from that data, they will engage with it as well, in my experience. And um, the pilot sort of thing that you referred to at the start of this was um it was really just throwing in at the deep end. It's like, let's get the chunkiest, crappiest kind of taxonomy of time tracking we can put together. Like, let's just throw some stuff in there and see what it looks like. And it was crappy data, but we ran with it for six months.

Charlotte Ward: 26:10

And and we tuned it a bit. We we realized ah, there's this thing that we're calling something that actually is really three different types of work. So let's break that out and give those different tags, you know, um, give it a bit more granularity. But after six months, and and the reason I the other reason I did ask the team very quickly to track time was it has a lead time in in terms of like when you're actually going to get something useful out of that data. It's not gonna be in the first week. You've got to let it run. So, you know, I knew it'd be six months before we got anything remotely useful out of it. And that was when we started to get a really decent understanding of what the team were doing and and actually have some surprising revelations, like, oh well, we would that takes that long every week. Why are we doing that? You know, and but but other and also otherwise, like we are spending not nearly enough time doing the other thing that we should be doing um as a team. Um, but but then you know, it we um completely refactored our tagging. So uh we created this whole taxonomy around how we track time. So there's there is like a hierarchy of tagging, and we can be very, very granular. And I said, I said to you right here before we hit recording, and I oh I wasn't joking. I have time track entries that are 30 seconds sometimes because we tack we track down to the customer, to the type of work for that customer, and the you know, that there's so much rich data that comes out of the team's time tracking, and and that's because we approached it really carefully. We did a chunky trial and then we refactored it to get some really, really good data. And since we did that refactor, it's been amazingly useful. And I've been able to tell so many, so many narratives, create so many initiatives, target so many improvements, and create so much want more understanding within the team and outside of the team about what all that stuff is that constantly is being pushed into support. Um, and it is a burden to the team. I know that, but I don't expect it to be perfect, you know. But I I do ask them to do as like as accurate as possible. So for so for just also just to kind of give um an idea of what my ask is of them, it's like I would like you to track everything. Um if reasonably humanly possible. But I know that it is not humanly possible to track everything, so therefore, I would like you to track about 80% of your tasks. If you're tracking about 80% of your time, that's good enough for me. Um, because that's really rich data. If I'm getting 80% of my team's time, working time, not breaks and things, but working time, that's good enough for me to extrapolate the rest. Um, and it gives me a huge um advantage when it comes to talking to other teams in the organization, to talking about our need for more people, to talk about what the work profile looks like across the team and what is reasonable and what we actually need to reduce and what we need to increase. Um, it's been amazing. Um, and I've introduced a number of metrics to the organization that have come out of I think. So the idea of customer occupancy, for instance. So um, how much my team's time I actually engaged with customers and how much I actually want them to be able to spend doing functional development, what I call functional development, which is yeah, which is improving their own life, you know, developing the support function. Um and and CPD, things like that. So um so I wouldn't have been able to do any of that without time tracking. Um I feel like I've just you've got me on a bit of a hobby horse now, and I you're I'm not I'm not giving you five minutes to give me your airing, but no, no, it's fine.

Ash Rhodes: 30:04

I did air mine. Like I my my only I I genuinely do see and and like from a completely organization in my own perspective as a leader part, like I'm sitting here like the this new gig that I'm about to go into only really has like one full-time, one part-time person, and then me. Um, and I'm highly considering doing something along those lines with both of these people because it would be very fascinating and helpful to get all of this. But the part of me that wants to continue to be the leader that I would want to work for does not want to do this. Because I would never, as an employee, I would probably quit. I I don't think I would do this because as I sit here and think about writing down or entering into any sort of uh clockify type of thing down to any amount of seconds or minutes or whatever for a full-time job, Ash wrote, go fuck yourself. Like I would just simply not do it. Um, because I am a professional and you like whether it is for making sure that we are like, in unless it is legitimately to make sure that we are um billing the customer, like you don't need that information. It might be a nice-to-have information type of thing, but you don't need it from me. And you don't pay me enough to like know every single minute of my life. If I wanted that kind of honestly, micromanagement, I would be working in person somewhere. Because that's really what it comes down to. It's kind of micromanaging, and um, I'm not trying to throw stones, like, but that's that like I would love that kind of data, but and like I I I want that kind of data, I desperately want it. Like sitting here hearing you talk about it, I'm like, yes, give it to me. But that's I I would never in a million years work for me if I was doing that. And if I would not work for me, I can't ask my reps to do it.

Charlotte Ward: 32:50

Yeah, yeah. I um I I I hear you, I hear you. I I think it has to, I think so. For me, transparency is absolutely critical to its success. Um that thing I said before about not using it to manage people individually or um, you know, making um using it as any kind of assessment of performance, never, you know. Uh and I wouldn't.

Ash Rhodes: 33:26

Like, and I know you wouldn't. I know. And I totally I totally hear you, but like but uh uh it just feels so ugly, you know.

Charlotte Ward: 33:35

It feels so ugly, but let me give you the flip side. Let me tell you a beautiful story.

Ash Rhodes: 33:39

I want to hear a beautiful story.

Charlotte Ward: 33:41

You want to hear a beautiful time tracking story. Um, after um I we had been time tracking for about a year and a quarter or so. So we had, as I said before, about the first six months were a bit ugly. It was a bit kind of, you know. It was rough. It was rough, it was better data than they'd than they'd ever had before. I joined, but it was pretty rough and ready. But it gave us, we were, we were managing to get some cycles of improvement out of it. We refactored, then we had six months. By the time we had about six months of that beautiful data. Um, by then the team trusted the data, the team were getting the value from the data, they were we were able to make improvements internally. And actually, there were some quite revelating, revelatory kind of um uh moments of like, I as I was saying before, like I wasn't aware this took so much of this time, you know. I wasn't um conversations with other teams where where other leaders in the organization would say, no, I don't think support does that, do they?

Ash Rhodes: 34:49

What do you mean they do that?

Charlotte Ward: 34:51

Well, the time tracking, here it is, for the last six months. Actually, we've spent 14 hours a month doing that for the last six months.

Ash Rhodes: 34:59

I thought my team did that.

Charlotte Ward: 35:00

Well, you're wrong. Exactly, exactly. Um, in fact, I've got two beautiful stories, and I will come to the second one in a minute. Having that data for about a year, the rest of the organization picked it up as a trial, time tracking across the whole organization. Um, other teams.

Ash Rhodes: 35:24

Is that a beautiful story though, or is that like a sad story about no?

Charlotte Ward: 35:29

I think it's a beautiful story because similar, similar revelations are now happening in other parts of the organization. But my very, very beautiful story is this. About six months after we'd got that extra beautiful data, one on my team came to me and said, and bear in mind they all have access to everyone on the team's data, so they can all see. And he said, I've been I've been looking back at my my time tracking for the last three or four months, and I have realized I'm spending far too much time doing XYZ, and I want to spend more time doing ABC. Um, and I think that the things I need to do, here are the four things I need to do to do more of ABC and less of XYZ. Um, and if I can make these changes, then that's the role I want to grow into.

Ash Rhodes: 36:21

Okay, that is a beautiful story.

Charlotte Ward: 36:23

Isn't that beautiful? He got that information from his own time tracking and came to me using it. With his own plan and with his own plan, his own progression, like he'd identified a progression that he wanted, and he did not get that without the time tracking. When it was laid out, and he I didn't even ask him to do this. He he just said he just had that moment of like, what the hell am I doing with my time? I I feel deeply unfulfilled, but he's got this, he's got the data. He went back and looked at what he was feeling so unfulfilled about.

Ash Rhodes: 36:58

Why do I hate this? It's because of these things, yeah. And what do I like doing? These other things. Exactly. That that is nice, okay. Mike, I I hear you. Still not necessarily going to do it, but I hear that it is not all evil all the time.

Charlotte Ward: 37:18

Handled right, I think, and in the right environment, because the burden had the pay, it has to have an ROI ultimately for your team.

Ash Rhodes: 37:26

And that's I feel like that's what how we started it. I I don't remember if it was while I was recording. I put it as is the juice worth the squeeze, which is the not at all professional way of saying, is the ROI there?

Charlotte Ward: 37:41

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you if you if you make it frictionless and if the environment is worth, you know, uh the effort of getting that kind of granularity and that clarity of data, particularly because of the complexity of it, in whatever way shape that complexity manifests, then I'm a huge advocate for it. I don't necessarily assume that I will do it at every role I will be a leader at. Here, it really made sense. And at one other place, it really made sense. Um, and in fact, I I was the one who brought it. No one else in this organization asked me to get my team to track time. I stepped in and said, I want to track time. And in fact, I had some pushback from some other parts of the organization saying, Are you sure? Like you want to step into a new role and ask your team to track. I was no, I really do need them to.

Ash Rhodes: 38:36

So, like, make your pitch. What tools did you use for this?

Charlotte Ward: 38:40

Clockify.

Ash Rhodes: 38:42

You did use Clockify? That's awesome. Um, that's what I am a huge fan of. If you are a uh independent contractor, uh anything like that, their free tools are just like I had, and we did we did assess a few.

Charlotte Ward: 39:02

Um historically, Harvest had been implemented a couple of years before for the billing side of things, um, when we used to have a perpetual services organization, but we don't anymore. Um, but it was not widely spread across the team. But also harvest for our needs when you're tracking 30-second entries is a bit, it's a bit clunky. Um, so my first the top of the list of requirements for any tool when we were assessing possible tools, and we we looked at about five, um, was as frictionless as an experience as possible, because the only way I was going to get accurate data in a fast-moving, complex environment was if it was easy for the team to produce that data. So top of the list was can it be everywhere? Can it be, you know, a click of a button to get going? And you know, uh, and Clockify is, you know, you it it pops up in Zendesk tickets. It's there's a little Clockify button. You'll have probably seen it pop, yes, it pops up in Jira, it it's got a Chrome plugin. There's there's a desktop app, there's a phone app, it's everywhere. So um, and and that's for free.

Ash Rhodes: 40:14

And like there currently oh, did you did you just do the free version or did you do the free version for the first year?

Charlotte Ward: 40:20

Um, and then at time of record giving them some money, yeah. Yeah, at time of recording, once the wider organization trialed it in other teams, then we went for the paid version, which was ridiculously small amount of money per yeah. It was tens of pounds.

Ash Rhodes: 40:36

Yeah, tens of I I was looking at paying for it just because I got such great use out of it. I felt like I own money.

Charlotte Ward: 40:44

Yes, yes.

Ash Rhodes: 40:46

So yeah, it's it's so cheap.

Charlotte Ward: 40:48

Like and the and the reporting is really powerful.

Ash Rhodes: 40:52

Um, and I included it on all of my invoices, like just a summary of the month, and like they're beautiful, well done. Yeah, I I could possibly.

Charlotte Ward: 41:02

And the fact that you can, yeah, and the fact that you can export to CSV, because then you're in the realms of Google Sheets, do whatever the hell you like, you know. Um, and and finally, just to just to uh a final beautiful story is this that one of my team, because they're a team of engineers, um, got dinging around in the API. Um, and and now we have our time tracking entry pushed into our redshift, and it joins up with all of our ops genie stuff, all of our Zendesk tickets. All of that. I have got a dashboard that I swear to god every month that is pulled from all of this data joined up. One of my team created it for me, and and a big chunk of that is is information that is enriched and indeed only exists because of time tracking.

Ash Rhodes: 41:56

That is super cool.

Charlotte Ward: 42:03

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two three one for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.