Dash Service Desk served 10’000 tickets!

Dear Dash Friends and Users,

We are writing to you from the Dash Core Group Service Desk, to announce an exciting milestone: we have recently passed the 10,000 ticket mark! The Service Desk was started with the aim of serving the Dash community with technical and general support, as well as keeping Dash Core team inboxes fed only with quality communications.

At the very beginning, I, Pabo Lema (aka fible1), and Slawek Dudzik (aka splawik21) worked collectively on any type of issues reported by our community and users. Shortly after launch, Robert Wiecko, COO of DCG, took over the Service Desk, and, as a newly formed Operations Team, we began to professionalize our work environment and processes with a view to offering the highest quality of support possible. In the early days, Slawek and myself were faced with the challenge of streamlining our communications with Dash Core teams:

• What should be escalated and to whom?
• Who is responsible for the communication?
• How bug fixes and workarounds should be deployed and by whom?

These and many other questions arose really quickly. In our specific, distributed environment, each team has different criteria regarding what they are interested in and how much of it they want to see. As team members rotated, we strived to keep pace with changing needs and expectations.

The types of tickets we have served over the past few years have told the story of Dash, from early buyers returning after many years, to find a windfall on their hands, to the latest months and years, when large business players are expressing interest in partnering with us. What these tickets have in common is growth. Tickets from customers whose lives have been changed by Dash are the ones we live for.

That is not to say there were no rocky days — sadly, some people don’t understand what they are getting into with crypto assets. There is also a group of people who write to us thinking we are Dash “the detergent” and I have to say, they are the friendliest. “The detergent” cases happen a few times a month and are nice and refreshing moments in our work :).

Among some of our other, rather unusual, adventures, I recall the first time we were contacted by law enforcement, in the early years of DCG. Regardless of the fact that we have never done anything wrong, that ticket ran a tingle down my spine. Crypto was so new back then, and the lines were always moving. Thankfully, these inquiries are now standardized, but signing my name to this kind of email, as the first point of contact, is always a point of anxiety, and we are always happy to move on when we escalate them to the executive team :).

The “sextortion” cases, which I do not believe many people are familiar with, started earlier this year, with users who received mass emails claiming to have “compromising photographs” in their possession and demanding payment in Dash. A classic scam. Some users were furious and demanded that we “ban and identify” the culprits to law enforcement. Sometimes this led to hard conversations with people who felt Dash facilitated these sorts of scams. It is not always easy to be one of the leaders in free and uncensorable technology.

We have had many other adventures with our clients and partners, and there is not enough time for me to share them all, but they all have something in common — Dash is on an exciting journey. Sometimes it’s smooth sailing and sometimes it’s a bumpy road, but we are permanently moving forward, even the bad days and the hard tickets, reflect the growing scale and importance of Dash worldwide.

The reason that many of you may not have heard of the Service Desk before, is that we have aimed to keep it small and agile. Currently, it is only Slawek and me. We invest many hours of our lives into it (we average 1h response times between us, and we were working 24/7/365), and much love, because we think we can make a difference for Dash by making the customer journey more pleasant. Sometimes that is about cheering Dash along with users, sometimes it is about explaining it to them and providing solutions to their problems.

Slawek and I were with the project almost since the very beginning of its existence and it always was and still is an exciting journey for us. As someone who has been here for a long time, I would like to say that working for the Service Desk and seeing the in’s and out’s of customers, has only increased my love for Dash as a startup, as a currency, and as a community.

As Dash grows in the future, we hope that you will hear a lot more from us, and we hope to expand our offerings to better serve you. Here is to the next 10,000 tickets!

Pablo aka fible1 Slawek aka splawik21