shift rotation

Shift rotation is a plan of hours. In some agencies the word also means staff turnover; not here. And it is not the handover, which is what moves between two shifts. The two get mixed up constantly in practice, but they are fixed separately: a rota can be perfect and the fan can still feel he has spoken to three different people in one evening.

How many chatters do you need?

Two for one daily block seven days a week, three once you double the evening. It scales with the hours you cover, not with the number of creators you have signed.

What you want covered	People needed
One daily block, seven days a week	two
The same block with the evening peak doubled	three
Round-the-clock coverage	five, weekends included

What sizes a shift is the volume of live threads, not the number of accounts. A chatter can hold several quiet accounts and be swamped by one account that is growing.

How should you cut the shifts?

Off your own sales-by-hour report, never into equal slices. Splitting the day into three identical blocks puts as much resource on the hours that do not sell as on the ones carrying the month.

Our data gives the shape of the curve: evenings maximise conversion, and the 2am to 6am window collapses it. Two practical consequences.

• Double the evening before you open anything else.
• Keep nights covered, with no sales target. Reply, keep threads warm, do not pitch. A chatter scored on 4am revenue is being scored on luck.

What does every shift change cost?

The exchange count, and it is the expensive one. How deep a thread already runs does not travel with it unless someone writes it down, so a conversation fifteen exchanges old gets picked up and treated as new, and pitched far too early. Only a written handover prevents that.

Three more costs sit underneath, none of them visible on a rota.

1. Pick-up time. Ten minutes of reading before the first message goes out, per person, per shift.
2. Voice drift. Every pair of hands adds its own vocabulary, and a week of threads shows it plainly.
3. Orphan threads. A lukewarm conversation belongs to nobody in particular, so nobody reopens it.

That is why you do not cut finer than you have to. Three well-held shifts beat five short ones.

Does a chatter follow a creator or a shift?

A shift, with a book of conversations attached to it. Assigning one person to one creator gives better tonal consistency but leaves a hole the first time she is off, and someone is always off. The workable compromise: one shift, one book, one named stand-in agreed in writing beforehand.

The consistency you lose by splitting hours has to be rebuilt elsewhere: through the voice guide and through quality control reading the starts of shifts.