Most businesses, and even many open source projects today, think very traditional about how to provide support to their users. Usually it goes something like this:

Code support should be provided from a core team member or outsourced through a hired consultancy firm. 

This may work out just fine, but isn't necessarily the best and most cost-effective way to solve user support. Numerous businesses and open source projects have large followings of devoted community members. Experts who might love their product, having geeked out on every single feature, and used the code and APIs extensively themselves, for maybe years. History has shown us that many of these people are happy to share their knowledge with the world. Especially if taking on tickets could be easy, streamlined, and compensated. 

Regardless of whether you are an open source project or a business, thinking about building hybrid support teams could make great sense. So what do we actually mean, when we use the term “hybrid support team”? - We mean a team consisting of various contributors such as the core team, for example a consultancy firm, and most importantly, community members with expert knowledge about the project. 

There are today great open source projects with communities that contribute quite comprehensively without any support setup, beside for example well administered Discord and Reddit servers, and without any offered compensation. Many of these projects completely rely on community support, and benefit immensely from their users.

Home Assistant and KDE - Impressive communities as the backbone

Home Assistant, a popular open source home automation platform, is a good example. They have impressive strong and active Reddit and Discord communities, and are described as “extremely well run and structured” with a “welcoming and inclusive feel”. Much of Home Assistant’s success can likely be credited to the community’s willingness to contribute, both when it comes to development and support of other users. It is of course hard to say where they would have been without such an active community, but their growth and adoption would probably not have been the same if it wasn’t for the fact that it is so easy to ask a question and actually get help. 

KDE, the community behind the desktop environment Plasma and applications like the graphics editor Krita, is another example of a project largely benefiting from their community engagement. Just as Home Assistant they have a large and active presence at both Discord and Reddit, as well as hosting their own user support page using Discourse as their tech base.

Having such setups makes it much easier for the community to engage, meet, and actually relieve the core team in support issues than it would have been without established, functional and structured forums with clear guidelines. Despite both Reddit and Discord having its limitations when it comes to doing support, it could be highly effective platforms to assist users.

Example of a personalized Home Assistant dashboard created by a community member. Source: community.home-assistant.io

Also businesses have valuable communities - And some know how to use them

While open source projects usually are way better at leveraging the force and value of an active community, there are also well-known commercial businesses doing the same. 

Salesforce has for almost 20 years had a deliberate strategy to leverage their community. Already in 2006, at the fraction of the size they are today, Salesforce officially established the Trailblazer Community, to provide both support and education to its users. This community has a lot of the “hybrid support team” consolidation that we are referring to, consisting of a vast network of users, developers and consultants that help each other out. Here users can ask questions, learn new skills, or get help with issues. Members can earn badges and points for their contributions, similar to how Reddit is solving it. This model does a lot of the “heavy lifting”, reducing the number of support tickets for employees, and letting internal support teams focus on more complex and critical tasks. 

JetBrains, a company that creates a suite of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for various programming languages, is another prime example. Considerably smaller than Salesforce, their business model is highly reliant on professional developers in their community. JetBrains engage them through official community forums, where users can ask questions and receive answers in a hybrid manner, from other users as well as JetBrains’ own support team. Here is JetBrain’s issue tracker, YouTrack, a core part of their community support. 

Despite the examples used are larger well-known projects and companies, the essence is the same if you have a smaller project or codebase you are working on. Leveraging your community is always a good thing. 

Regardless of project size - What do hybrid support teams give you?

Just started or well established. Commercial or open source. No matter where you come from, there are many reasons to consider building hybrid support teams. From our perspective these are the most important ones.

• Increased capacity - Can take on more support with shorter response times, and potentially around the clock catering, if your community resides in different time zones. 

• Discover new talent - When you engage your community in support, and have a functional and capable system in place that track performance and other relevant support details, this can act as a good foundation for hiring or recruiting the best community performers to your core team.

• Increased flexibility - Leaning on community resources makes it easier to adjust your team size up and down, adding and removing team members based on performance and need. Convenient and ideal when having an unpredictable growth curve. 

• Cost-effective - Leaning on your community can be cost-effective, as you can compensate community team-members per ticket, not on an hourly basis. Also adjusting the team size easily, may contribute to less costs. 

• May incentivize your community - Being able to easily take on tickets, see your own stats, and of course, get paid for your contributions, can give an extra motivation to engage in your project among people in your community. 

Quicker responses, wider “opening hours”, a structured interface and simplicity when it comes to support, may also positively affect adoption and growth for your project, and makes it easier for larger business users to choose your project, as you will check off more boxes at their part. We have written another article touching on this topic, for the largest ones; Making your open source project enterprise friendly through support. 

Thinking about having a hybrid team setup is not critical for all projects. Many may be able to serve current support needs with their core team. But if you can use a relief, want to incentivize your community in contributing, or just want to position yourself for handling an upwards pointing adoption trend, a hybrid team setup might be something to consider. 

Githelp is a solution that can help out with that.