The Quality Vs. Quantity of Volunteers By Example

In this article, I am going to discuss my real life experience and observation of quality vs quantity in recruiting volunteers and lessons learned by me by when I was at Microsoft Gaming Zone as a volunteer. A lot of the same issues in this articles are still present in today’s Internet.

Someone mentioned to me last week that their organization with over 350 volunteers did what they wanted to with little oversight. So that bought back memories of me and my volunteer position with Microsoft as a Systems Operator on the Microsoft Gaming Zone in a tale of two different volunteer systems.

The MS Gaming Zone was an elaborate chat lobby system with games built in and launched. Back in 1998, I applied and was heavily recruited as one of the youngest volunteers working in the retail game lobbies of the MS Gaming Zone because to my influence in the community.

In order to become one, I had to sign an NDA, attend online classes, become a Zstar(probationary designation), and pass a test. These standards were tough and definitely strict. If you passed the test you made it and became part of an A-Team of volunteers. When I joined the team the MS Gaming Zone was hovering around 9k-10k peak users daily and under 80 system operators for all the lobbies.

As part of the team, I learned how to do Q and A, Submit bug reports, tech support, and how to handle customer service issues in addition to my primary goal of monitoring game lobbies. As part of my training and join the team I was required to donate 10 hours of scheduled coverage time a week.

As the Microsoft Gaming Zone grew more popular, the need to recruit and train more volunteers became apparent, due an overwhelming user base which grew exponentially monthly.

They were forced to use other additional methods for coverage such as chat rooms with a Que system, push more users to use email solutions, and backroom lobbies where sysops would hang out to go to where is needed at the time like a 911 dispatch method. This is where the quality was at its peak but started to diminish due to the continued onslaught large volume of users and lack of resources to manage adequate coverage.

Volunteers were being trained at an alarming rate but some corners were cut in getting them promoted to handle the load of the record concurrent users visiting the Zone. The volunteers were training the volunteers. MS HQ were also enforcing make us “work” and checking to see if we were active because of the need. This is where the definition of a “Volunteer” and a job became apparent. At the same time, EA was sued for requiring volunteers to “work”. 

Microsoft didn’t want to end up in the same predicament as EA. They hired the company Participate Systems to normalize the volunteer system and change the quality of the excellent customer service forever on the Microsoft Gaming Zone.

The new system that was created was called the Member Plus System. If you wanted to become a sysop, all you needed to do is to apply and you were most likely accepted. Many tools were removed and downgraded to prevent abuse.

This allowed Microsoft to prevent a lobby nightmare and customer service hell by rogue volunteers. The new orientation materials basically gave an overview of the commands and short explanation what to do. This is far less then what I had to do when I was trained. These new volunteers had no requirements.

Volunteers could now play games with their token names on, instead of having secondary name for the sysop purpose which was a standard practice. This protected the operator from user harassment and provided anonymity if they wanted it.

There was no requirement to act on a problematic user or manage a lobby. The end result was that the quality of the sysops greatly diminished but the appearance and odds of coverage of having a sysop to monitor a lobby increased.

This is where the having quality vs quantity should be taken into account when using volunteers. The importance of training of a volunteer is important to your image. The quantity of volunteers is also important as long they are able to be normalized in training along with the quality volunteers.

No two people are the same but if you teach them specific guidelines certain critical mistakes can be prevented through the proper training. Social media back then consisted of instant messages, web chats and forums mostly.

Giving your customer a positive experience in dealing with issues can be the single most important experience to provide your community. Because the negative experience is more likely to last a long time, you could lose the customer forever .

This original article was published on my blog site at http://mbhahn.com/Blog/tabid/83/EntryId/20/The-Quality-Vs-Quantity-of-Volunteers-By-Example.aspx