DCG Support Desk Celebrates its 5th Anniversary

The history of the DCG Support Desk, a small team within Dash Core Group, mirrors the history of Dash itself. As we approach the 5 year anniversary of the support desk, and the 15,000 resolved ticket milestone, we would like the community to know more about us, and how we contribute to DCG and the community – even if our efforts are not obvious to community members.

The support desk was founded in 2017 by Fernando. Slawek, aka splawik 21, and Pablo, aka fible1 (myself) were recruited to help set it up as long-time community members who are experienced technically (Slawek) and familiar with support desk operations (Pablo). This was a key milestone for Dash Core, as it moved from an ad-hoc group, to a “real” startup. The importance of having a point of contact for ecosystem participants with Dash Core Group was realized early.

It was a risky move however, at a time when Dash Core was just establishing itself, and the commitment needed by the leadership team to take this customer first approach to professionalizing the services offered was not assured success. It always impressed us that DCG was being built from scratch, but with excellence in mind. We distinctly remember logging into Confluence, a shared documentation and interaction platform used by DCG, and seeing the documentation being written day by day, one article at a time. From scratch.

In the beginning, we established a trend that has sustained itself, in its broad strokes, over many years. There is a divide between clients who seek technical help and those who seek more generalized aid from the support desk. Tickets range from “my coins don’t show up on my wallet,” to “how do I send coins to my friend?.” These may sound like similar problems, but they are vastly different; one is a technical question, which requires expertise to track down, the other requires a simple explanation to resolve. As support traffic grew, we each specialized in what type of issues we covered, though often with overlap to meet the growing volume of inquiries.

It has been interesting to see the initiatives Dash Core has undertaken, laid out in support desk traffic. One we often mention is the Venezuela initiative, which at a certain point peaked ticket traffic with Colombian and Venezuelan users. This traffic has ebbed and flowed over the years, and it has been interesting to watch these initiatives play out internally and on the support desk. Other trends have also reflected the current climate, such as the collapse in conference invites as Covid struck, and the marked increase in business related requests that began to come in at the same time.

The support desk has a small yet dedicated two-person team. We have averaged one hour response time 24/7, 365 days a year since we started working 5 years ago. There has been no downtime, and 100% of users have received same day (within 24 hours) first response times. This is not only due to the dedication we have put into it, but because DCG is a special type of company, which has made it easy for us to carry out our work unencumbered. Slawek and I view the next 15,000 tickets as a challenge we are excited to meet, not a daily grind.

If the dev team is the beating heart of Dash Core, the support desk is DCG’s liver. We put great effort into filtering, and verifying all the leads we escalate to the different teams we work with and the support desk has saved devs and other team members hundreds of hours of lost time dealing with issues that should not take away from valuable development time. We have done the same for the several other teams within the Dash network.

So as we hit this five year anniversary, let’s remember that the support desk has collected, in ticket form, what could be a parallel history of the Dash ecosystem. One that reflects our commitment to excellence. It’s been our great pleasure to follow Dash and Dash Core Group’s growth, and are excited to continue working with the network.

To the next 5 years,

Pablo and Slawek.

For support, visit the support desk website to submit a ticket.

Author: Pablo