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Pre-Proposal: ''Dash Chat''

R

Roberto Julio Azar

Member
Hi guys! I am really excited about presenting this project to you all.
This is a Live Chat project proposal for www.dash.org

Status update: This proposal is live at: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/Dash-Chat

Please take some minutes to go over all the documentation, I am sure you will like what you find! I would highly appreciate it if you give some constructive criticism after you’ve gone through all the documentation so that we can make this project a reality.

1) ‘’Dash Chat’’ proposal document: https://goo.gl/OQIvgY

2) Dash Chat Policy folder: https://goo.gl/DC0PsJ

Please go over the material below to get a better understanding of what the ‘’Dash Chat’’ project has to offer.Note: All these files are in Google Drive, you don’t need a gmail account to access them. You may access them from any browser. Kindly let me know if you’d like to receive another format of the documentation, such as PDF or a word file. I know my screencasting/voice over skills aren’t that great but the main thing is to focus on the project itself by reading all the documentation. Thank you!
 
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That is a lot of information, great work preparing it. I'll admit that I haven't gone through all of it because I'm in a hurry atm, but I already have some general comments.

A few of us are already working on improving support in the near future. I fully agree with you that we need that in order to grow. Right now we say we don't provide it, but many people contact through the contact anyway, so we need something. The biggest problem is that the range of doubts people have usually require wide knowledge and asking others, so it is not just about having someone online at that moment. Also, being an open source project, albeit with some budget, we have to be realistic and favour forms of support that have some reusable output. For that reason we are leaning towards a QA format in which everyone can contribute, with some support ticket system on top of that. Chat can be great for that second part, but I would do something asynchronous, at least to start with. We can also leverage the several slack teams that are already active. It is not as good because people need to sign up, and many won't, but we should keep them in mind.

As for the budget, I don't think we can afford the amounts you are talking about. I really hope that at some moment in the future the treasury can pay market rates to the people working in the project, but right now even some developers who have been working full time in the project for a while don't get that. Besides that, I don't think we have the size or volume needed to have full time agents... yet :)

Anyway, I'll try to watch all the videos and keep adding more thoughts as they come.
 
Thank you for the feedback. I would recommend to check out the Dash Chat Policy files to get a better understanding of the project, especially Policy Files 3.0 - 3.9
I really recommend that you do that because my project was not necessarily adding ''live support'', rather it is an advocacy program.
Also, let's say it was a live support project, do you really feel that sending potential dash users or already existing dash users to a slack group is wise? I think most people would rather have a one on one conversation with an agent.

Here is the Dash Chat Policy file folder: https://goo.gl/DC0PsJ
Please check it out! =)
 
I know it is advocacy, but we are in a field that has a very difficult to understand and use product. If you open a communication channel, people will use it to ask for support. Current website form is not there for support and still 80% of contacts are about support. Also, at some point both advocacy and support mix together... you get someone interested in Dash, he installs the wallet and something goes wrong (unfortunately that happens a lot!)... now you need to support and get technical... I think we have to assume that all contacts with users may end up being a support ticket and we need to be able to answer those too.

Anyway, I'll check those other files too :)

Btw, are you in Spain? (I'm in Madrid)
 
Great idea but way too soon and too expensive right now. In 2-3 years this could work though, but maybe start with a little bit less ambitious project.
Once we get the new beta website going and a month or two after 12.1 is released and stable could be a good time for you to do a free 1 month demo. That way all the slack and btctalk folks ect could help test it and quiz your knowledge of Dash etc.
However, it sounds like fernando and the core team have quite a bit cheaper more decentralized solution they are working on.

The "5-7" operators/agents would not be needed for years, at least not at the hourly rates you request, 1.25 dash an hour. We could not afford it and just aren't ready yet anyway. That would be something we would need to grow into.
I like the plan but i see it as a long term plan not something that is needed right now. I could possibly see something like this working towards the end of this year as a 3 maybe 4 man operation with no need for a "Quality Assurance Manager" or "mini treasury" funds for some time.

"The purpose of this treasury is to have some readily available funds should there be a need to use them, for example… Our agent “Bob’s” laptop breaks down and for some reason he isn’t able to afford to repair it at the moment. He would communicate this concern with the manager, and the manager would investigate and offer him a loan from the treasury to fix his laptop asap."

Something like that is years away from now, at that point we could probably afford something like that if we thought that was even appropriate.

It is very well thought out and put together but just too soon and may have overlap with other projects and core plans. I would say hang around here for a few months, chat with the community and then demo it sometime in the second quarter if core has not implemented a better/cheaper solution.
 
Hey. I read through some part of your proposal, watched the video, etc - I'd like to share some ideas with you.

First of all, thanks for the effort, it's a great idea. It seems like you spent some years in this industry, and know how to organize work efficiently there.

There are a few things I am concerned about though. They might come off a bit harsh - sorry about that, English is not my native language. All I wrote was intended to be constructive criticism.
As a project manager I'd be worried about the ROI of spending 1000 DASH/month on such a service. I see no way it's worth the expense at the moment.
As an agile coach I'd be worried about the upfront detailed plan resulting in a complex system without having any idea about what exactly the market needs.
As a MN owner I'd like to know how many people would use the service offered for 12k USD/month. How many unique visitors do we get to our website / day? How many do we expect to convert just because of this feature? I need data.
As a Dash enthusiast, I'd love to NOT see people paid by our blockchain spamming social media, cold calling, etc. Once we have a clear business value proposal, and have services that could bring value to the target of our cold calls - well, maybe then.

Others have already mentioned that the costs are not justified in the current state of the project. Maybe in a few years from now, sure. Definitely not now.
Financing 5-7 people with 15 USD/hour would be insane - you can get experienced freelance developers for that price (sure, not in the US).

But since I like the idea itself let me give some recommendations:
- Try to gather feedback before writing so detailed plans. After investing a lot of effort it feels terrible to be rejected, and you will not hear the honest constructive criticism - instead it will feel like someone's attacking your work. If you invested less time in giving a solution it would be WAY easier psychologically to contribute to other plans aiming to solve the same issue.
- Try to gather feedback before writing so detailed plans. You are trying to change communication channels, and the maintainers of the current channels might have different plans. We are actually working on a solution for the usual support questions we receive.
- Start small, gather information and feedback: Implementing the free tool with 1 agent would be perfectly enough to check if there is demand for this service at all. Maybe nobody cares, who knows?
 
Hi Roberto, thanks so much for all the work you put together even just for the pre-proposal!

I haven't read anyone else's feedback yet so this is just my first impressions based on a preliminary skim through your materials.

It might be difficult to measure recruitment/successes here. Most of the time when I think about live chats, the way the company might quantify effectiveness is whether or not a sale happens. Also, chats with people are relatively easy to falsify. This would be instead more like an on-call help desk

In order to drive costs down, you might want to think about leveraging our community to help with this. While I understand that time is valuable, paying a full time position of 10 or $15 per hour to cover the chat might not be the best way. I think it is very likely that at least initially, there will not be very many users at all on the dash.org website who are going to respond to a chat request (I am assuming the initial chat request is automated?). What we would really need is coverage - maybe have people sign up for different timeslots just to be available in case somebody has a question on the live chat.

Your proposal might be overshooting a little bit with the idea of reaching out to people on Instagram, Facebook,..etc - I'd rather see the scope of this particular project limited to only the live chat.

I think your policies are really good and are definitely in line with a professional approach to integrating a live chat though. More thoughts later---
 
balu said:
Hey. I read through some part of your proposal, watched the video, etc - I'd like to share some ideas with you.

First of all, thanks for the effort, it's a great idea. It seems like you spent some years in this industry, and know how to organize work efficiently there.

There are a few things I am concerned about though. They might come off a bit harsh - sorry about that, English is not my native language. All I wrote was intended to be constructive criticism.
As a project manager I'd be worried about the ROI of spending 1000 DASH/month on such a service. I see no way it's worth the expense at the moment.
As an agile coach I'd be worried about the upfront detailed plan resulting in a complex system without having any idea about what exactly the market needs.
As a MN owner I'd like to know how many people would use the service offered for 12k USD/month. How many unique visitors do we get to our website / day? How many do we expect to convert just because of this feature? I need data.
As a Dash enthusiast, I'd love to NOT see people paid by our blockchain spamming social media, cold calling, etc. Once we have a clear business value proposal, and have services that could bring value to the target of our cold calls - well, maybe then.

Others have already mentioned that the costs are not justified in the current state of the project. Maybe in a few years from now, sure. Definitely not now.
Financing 5-7 people with 15 USD/hour would be insane - you can get experienced freelance developers for that price (sure, not in the US).

But since I like the idea itself let me give some recommendations:
- Try to gather feedback before writing so detailed plans. After investing a lot of effort it feels terrible to be rejected, and you will not hear the honest constructive criticism - instead it will feel like someone's attacking your work. If you invested less time in giving a solution it would be WAY easier psychologically to contribute to other plans aiming to solve the same issue.
- Try to gather feedback before writing so detailed plans. You are trying to change communication channels, and the maintainers of the current channels might have different plans. We are actually working on a solution for the usual support questions we receive.
- Start small, gather information and feedback: Implementing the free tool with 1 agent would be perfectly enough to check if there is demand for this service at all. Maybe nobody cares, who knows?
Click to expand...

In order for us to know how many unique visitors we get to www.dash.org we would need to have a tool such as Google analytics set for the website. Is that already set? I saw the alexa ranking for dash.org and it should have a decent amount of daily traffic. In order for me to provide data, the system has to be up and running for at least a month... Or else how would I be able to provide accurate data?

What hourly rate do you think would be fair for this position? I personally would work for less than that if it is for helping promote dash, for any other job I myself would not work for less than $12 per hour... I really want dash to succeed and would love for my children to live in a world where they can pay for their basic needs and for services in dash. That'd be so amazing really.

The main reason why I made such a detailed plan for Dash Chat was so that the MN owners understand exactly what I envision. I would not feel upset if it is rejected, whatever is best for the Dash community is fine by me.
 
fernando said:
I know it is advocacy, but we are in a field that has a very difficult to understand and use product. If you open a communication channel, people will use it to ask for support. Current website form is not there for support and still 80% of contacts are about support. Also, at some point both advocacy and support mix together... you get someone interested in Dash, he installs the wallet and something goes wrong (unfortunately that happens a lot!)... now you need to support and get technical... I think we have to assume that all contacts with users may end up being a support ticket and we need to be able to answer those too.

Anyway, I'll check those other files too :)

Btw, are you in Spain? (I'm in Madrid)
Click to expand...

Hey Fernando, sorry for the late reply! Had a busy day I went out to have a buffet, then went to buy 12 BTC to set up a masternode and now I really must do some studying! Okay so to answer your questions... In many professional establishments there are departments, for example the sales department and tech department. I can give you examples of websites or call centers that do this. I do agree it'd be great to have the agents be both tech support and specialized Dash advocates... But not everyone has a background in tech, I myself dont have a background in technology, however, I will spend many hours learning. If I put my mind to it, I can accomplish great things!
 
Roberto Julio Azar said:
In order for us to know how many unique visitors we get to www.dash.org we would need to have a tool such as Google analytics set for the website. Is that already set? I saw the alexa ranking for dash.org and it should have a decent amount of daily traffic. In order for me to provide data, the system has to be up and running for at least a month... Or else how would I be able to provide accurate data?

What hourly rate do you think would be fair for this position? I personally would work for less than that if it is for helping promote dash, for any other job I myself would not work for less than $12 per hour... I really want dash to succeed and would love for my children to live in a world where they can pay for their basic needs and for services in dash. That'd be so amazing really.

The main reason why I made such a detailed plan for Dash Chat was so that the MN owners understand exactly what I envision. I would not feel upset if it is rejected, whatever is best for the Dash community is fine by me.
Click to expand...

Fair is a bad word to use imho in case of compenation due to its subjective nature. It's always unfair from some angle. What I'm saying is that if this is the cost of the service then it's not worth it currently, there are better ways to spend this amount.

About gathering accurate data: sure, the system needs to be set up first. That's a must for getting real "customer" feedback.It would still be terribly difficult to measure success though.

To be frank what we are working on currently is LIMITING the amount of "official" communication channels, and this proposal would open up yet another high-maintenance one.
 
TroyDASH said:
Hi Roberto, thanks so much for all the work you put together even just for the pre-proposal!

I haven't read anyone else's feedback yet so this is just my first impressions based on a preliminary skim through your materials.

It might be difficult to measure recruitment/successes here. Most of the time when I think about live chats, the way the company might quantify effectiveness is whether or not a sale happens. Also, chats with people are relatively easy to falsify. This would be instead more like an on-call help desk

In order to drive costs down, you might want to think about leveraging our community to help with this. While I understand that time is valuable, paying a full time position of 10 or $15 per hour to cover the chat might not be the best way. I think it is very likely that at least initially, there will not be very many users at all on the dash.org website who are going to respond to a chat request (I am assuming the initial chat request is automated?). What we would really need is coverage - maybe have people sign up for different timeslots just to be available in case somebody has a question on the live chat.

Your proposal might be overshooting a little bit with the idea of reaching out to people on Instagram, Facebook,..etc - I'd rather see the scope of this particular project limited to only the live chat.

I think your policies are really good and are definitely in line with a professional approach to integrating a live chat though. More thoughts later---
Click to expand...


Thank you for your feedback TroyDash. I agree that right now it is difficult to measure the recruitment/success. For us to be able to evaluate that accurately, the project should be operating successfully for at least a month to three months. Leveraging the community to help with this does sound like a great idea, however, you should know the reality of things. I've worked with volunteers in the past, believe me, 98% are not consistent, they would work whenever they ''feel'' like working without having a sense of responsibility. That would be detrimental to the success of the operation. Falsifying a chat could be possible, however, I would definitely work and do my best to prevent this sort of thing. Why do you think many businesses and organizations have live chat if falsifying a chat is easy? Surely there must be some benefit to having a live chat operation or else the big guys wouldn't be doing it. Perhaps removing the 10-15 dash prize I suggested for the incentive program would be a good idea to prevent falsification of chats.
Let me know your full feedback once you get the chance to through the whole project please. :)
 
balu said:
Fair is a bad word to use imho in case of compenation due to its subjective nature. It's always unfair from some angle. What I'm saying is that if this is the cost of the service then it's not worth it currently, there are better ways to spend this amount.

About gathering accurate data: sure, the system needs to be set up first. That's a must for getting real "customer" feedback.It would still be terribly difficult to measure success though.

To be frank what we are working on currently is LIMITING the amount of "official" communication channels, and this proposal would open up yet another high-maintenance one.
Click to expand...

I'd gladly be willing to volunteer for sometime and present a solid operation system to measure all this data in a more accurate way. Did you check out the quality assurance parts of the project? That was just a first step.

Do you think that limiting communication about dash would be beneficial for the success of Dash? I really thinking promoting Dash as much as possible would be something beneficial for the ecosystem in general. Perhaps the masternodes would agree that 1.25 per hour is too high but 0.85 per hour would be doable. The only reason why I said that was because that's the amount I would pay my employees, but please remember that I myself would work for free for a while. I don't have a problem with that. However, a lot of people wouldn't be able to do the same or have enough motivation to volunteer for so long. Perhaps you'd be able to suggest a more realistic rate per hour?
 
Roberto Julio Azar said:
Thank you for your feedback TroyDash. I agree that right now it is difficult to measure the recruitment/success. For us to be able to evaluate that accurately, the project should be operating successfully for at least a month to three months. Leveraging the community to help with this does sound like a great idea, however, you should know the reality of things. I've worked with volunteers in the past, believe me, 98% are not consistent, they would work whenever they ''feel'' like working without having a sense of responsibility. That would be detrimental to the success of the operation. Falsifying a chat could be possible, however, I would definitely work and do my best to prevent this sort of thing. Why do you think many businesses and organizations have live chat if falsifying a chat is easy? Surely there must be some benefit to having a live chat operation or else the big guys wouldn't be doing it. Perhaps removing the 10-15 dash prize I suggested for the incentive program would be a good idea to prevent falsification of chats.
Let me know your full feedback once you get the chance to through the whole project please. :)
Click to expand...

Yeah I would also agree that if it's up entirely to volunteers, the quality and reliable coverage goes way down. So if we're going to have a live chat, compensation of some kind may be appropriate. The thing I foresee happening though is having somebody manning the station with nothing to do 95% of the time, just based on the amount of traffic that the site gets and how many of those people are actually going to want to chat.

How difficult would it be just to set up the integration? I might be willing to subsidize the integration on the dash.org website plus just a really short test run just to get some data to scope out how useful the live chat would be for us -- because it seems the cost of the software would be the least expensive piece. If we are going to implement, I think we should find a way to spend for only what we need, so I would focus heavily on finding a compensation method that is a good fit for the needs of the project.
 
TroyDASH said:
Yeah I would also agree that if it's up entirely to volunteers, the quality and reliable coverage goes way down. So if we're going to have a live chat, compensation of some kind may be appropriate. The thing I foresee happening though is having somebody manning the station with nothing to do 95% of the time, just based on the amount of traffic that the site gets and how many of those people are actually going to want to chat.

How difficult would it be just to set up the integration? I might be willing to subsidize the integration on the dash.org website plus just a really short test run just to get some data to scope out how useful the live chat would be for us -- because it seems the cost of the software would be the least expensive piece. If we are going to implement, I think we should find a way to spend for only what we need, so I would focus heavily on finding a compensation method that is a good fit for the needs of the project.
Click to expand...

I understand your concerns and I've come up with ideas to maximize an agent's workload should there be low volumes of chat traffic. In the project proposal I mentioned a few ''side-tasks'' that the agents would perform if there is low chat volume. And in the reports sections I will be able to verify that, I will know how many hours, minutes and seconds the agent was online and out of those how many hours, minutes and seconds he spent chatting with the visitors. Not only that but I will also have access to his average response times for each message so I will know the agent is not purposefully prolonging the chat out of laziness.

What do you mean by ''How difficult would it be just to set up the integration?''? The process of setting up the livechat software on dash.org is fairly simple, its a matter of copying/pasting the JavaScript code into the website's HTML code. A web developer can do this within 10 minutes :)

And yes, I agree, we should ONLY spend on what we need. I'm willing to be paid less than the rest and should there be an incentive program for the agent with the most recruits I would automatically disqualify myself for that prize.
 
@Roberto Julio Azar

Roberto,
I appreciate the idea; I actually suggested/volunteered running live chat by myself a couple of years ago. I agree that the proposal is too expensive with a too low ROI at this point in time, in the future, with a 10X treasury and a 10X user base, it will not only be viable, but needed.

My main comment would be that support agents, good ones from oversees, earn about 600-1000 USD per month for 8 hours, 6 days a week, so 15 USD per hour is out there. I started in business with call centers, so I know what I am talking about. Hope that helps your calculations.

At this time I would vote "no" due to the high cost in terms of Dash, if the price of Dash greatly appreciates, or you decide to scale down the project, i will be happy to both volunteer, and vote "yes".

Hope my insight helps a bit,
Pablo.
 
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fible1 said:
@Roberto Julio Azar

Roberto,
I appreciate the idea; I actually suggested/volunteered running live chat by myself a couple of years ago. I agree that the proposal is too expensive with a too low ROI at this point in time, in the future, with a 10X treasury and a 10X user base, it will not only be viable, but needed.

My main comment would be that support agents, good ones from oversees, earn about 600-1000 USD per month for 12 hours, 6 days a week, so 15 USD per hour is out there. I started in business with call centers, so I know what I am talking about. Hope that helps your calculations.

At this time I would vote "no" due to the high cost in terms of Dash, if the price of Dash greatly appreciates, or you decide to scale down the project, i will be happy to both volunteer, and vote "yes".

Hope my insight helps a bit,
Pablo.
Click to expand...

Hey Pablo! Thank you for your feedback. What modifications can I make exactly to the proposal so that it is a more attractive proposal to the Masternodes exactly? What do you mean exactly by 12 hours, 6 days a week for 600-1000 USD? You mean to potentially hire a person from overseas for working as a live chat agent for 72hrs/week for a total compensation of 600 USD to 1000 USD? What is a more realistic budget for this project in your opinion?
 
@Roberto Julio Azar

I think you could lower the proposal to one agent in the highest traffic hours for the site (google analytics).

I meant you pay the agent between 600-1000 USD per month for 8 hours work, six days a week. I said 12 hours a day in the original, but that is a typo and I am fixing it. Still, that is a significant discount to 15 USD per hour. You can hire these guys online, which is sometime touch and go, or, you can ask a member in India or the Philippines to help you out. They could conceivably hire a guy from a call center employment agency and set him up in their own office and get some Dash a month for their effort and training.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Pablo.
 
The reason why I initially chose 1.25 Dash per hour is because that is something I myself would pay an employee of mine. However, if the Dash MasterNode owners agree that it is in the best interest of dash to make this project a reality by hiring overseas talent for a much lower rate then sure, I would do my best to work with what is presented to me. My only concern would be the quality of agents from Asian countries... Not always is going for the least expensive option, the best option. However, if that's what the masternode owners can agree upon considering current circumstances, then sure. I would happily work closely with a group of foreign agents and do my best to train them in the way I envision Dash Chat to be.

By the way @fible1 did you manage to check out all the documentation for Dash Chat yet?

Let me know what you guys think please @TroyDASH @balu @mastermined @fernando
 
@Roberto Julio Azar

This amount would be for a pretty good agent, I've actually hired native speakers from English speaking countries living in Bolivia for 600 bucks a month. You can definitely get an expat for 1K USD in Bolivia if you do some searching. There is a reason the Phillipines and India are call center hubs, they have excellent speakers. The type of agent you are probably thinking of work at call centers that "specialize" in cheap but poor service and they have a high turnover rate, and they earn half of what we are discussing. This is really a very good salary for a call center agent. Damn near outstanding.

If Bolivian law weren't so shitty I would set this up for you myself. Try Odesk or google and you can find what other people are paying and what reviews they are giving their agents.

Hope that helps,
Pablo.
 
I would definitely hold off submitting this till at least february. There is a LOT of info to digest and it will need a full month or more of discussion to have a chance to pass. I don't think it will pass as is right now and will cost over $60. In feb it will be much cheaper too.
The core team also said they were working on something similar so i would hold off, take a deep breath and hang out and discuss the best course of action moving forward. Don't rush it!
 
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