When I was gone for military training in June, Jason and Dustin set up a ZenDesk account to organize our tech support ticket process. This has actually turned out to be an amazing solution. But it wasn’t at first. Let me explain.
Most of the time people ask questions that are fairly easy for most members of the team to answer. Some folks ask how a feature works, or what a setting does, or they encounter an error that we’ve seen a dozen times before and know how to fix immediately. When that’s the case, pretty much anyone on the team can help them out.
When there’s an actual bug or glitch, perhaps a conflict with another theme or plugin, then I have to get involved and figure what is causing the conflict and how to fix it.
So when I got home from my military adventures, I had a ton of tickets in there waiting for my attention. I was so overwhelmed. I actually dreaded logging into the ticket system because there was so much going on.
This has finally been completely remedied. I’ve spent a ton of time over the past month upgrading the plugin, fixing the bug reports that people have been sending, and responding to and getting know some of the customers.
And a couple days ago we finally hit complete inbox zero on the ticket system.
Since then, we have been solving any issue that people have usually within an hour or two of submission even on the weekends (unless they send it in the middle of the night because, hey, I like my sleep).
Our stats now look something like this:
- Past 30 Days: Average of 22.2 hours to a ticket’s completion
- Past 7 Days: Average of 6.1 hours to a ticket’s completion
- Past 24 Hours: Average of 1 hour to a ticket’s completion
This means that among all the tickets submitted in the past 24 hours, it takes us an average of about an hour to get the issue completely resolved.
So we’re trending back in the right direction. Now that I have it all under control, I hope to see our 30 day average continue to move down to the 1 hour mark as well.
It’s great to be able to respond to a ticket 10 – 15 minutes after it’s submitted and be able to offer the solution needed for the customer.
Most conversations now end with them telling me how happy they are with my support. That kind of feedback is worth more than anything to me. I just love it! I’ve gone from feeling overwhelmed, to feeling confident and encouraged, and that rocks!
So the team and I had some growing pains and some failures in this area, but I’m proud to say that we’ve made it through. We now seem to be able to keep everything taken care of very quickly, and our customers seem very happy again, and that makes me happier than I can express.
Anyways, thanks for listening, and, more importantly, thanks for all the patience and encouragement!
Keep up the good work, guys!
Thanks, Dylan!
Hey Nicholas, I am interested to know if you use the product knowledgebase while answering customer queries.
A KB is integral to any customer support process as I wrote a detailed post at: http://www.in23hours.com/blog/2015/07/14-ways-how-your-customer-support-benefits-from-a-knowledgebase/.
Cheers, Vinish
We use a knowledge base some. We just started building it a few months ago and we have most of the important issues in there documented and we reference it whenever we feel it’s appropriate.