If you’ve called into support in the past two weeks, you may have noticed something. For starters, the average time it took a support rep to answer the phone was less than 30 seconds. We also recorded zero abandoned calls.
Call volume was the same as always, so how did this happen?
About a month ago, we asked Claire Lam, our head of professional services department, to take on some additional responsibility to help us understand some of the key challenges within the Technical Support group and implement some changes.
For the past several weeks, Claire and her team have been pretty busy.
As our new head of Reseller Technical Support, Claire is applying what she’s learned working with large hosting providers, combined with her background in customer service, software development and business process to identify to implement changes that will help us deliver on our promise of Reseller Friendly customer service.
Measuring for Service
As a data-driven individual, her first order of business was to implement the right measurements. “We need to know how we’re doing today, so we can figure out how we can do better tomorrow.” Claire told me.
Part of this data collection project involved the introduction of Top 5 issues affecting resellers that Claire shares with the entire company on a weekly basis, and the implementation of a short reseller satisfaction survey sent after the closure of every ticket “Resellers aren’t required to complete the short survey, but those who do will be providing us with actionable data we can use to improve” Claire says.
Trying New Things!
In addition to the more traditional methods of support management, Claire and her team are trying new things.
Last week, with the help of Jonathan Clarke, one of our senior support analysts, worked with Claire to implement LiveChat support service right on key areas of the OpenSRS website. It’s on a trial basis with a goal of serving the needs of resellers who are unable to call us, but are looking for something a little more realtime than email. So far, testing has been positive and it’s a perfect example of the kind of thing we think our reseller customers will appreciate.
What’s next in Support?
There’s a number other things Claire’s been working on, but rather than list them here, I’ve asked her to think about some topics she’d like to share and we’ll share them with you here shortly.
So this won’t be the last you’ve heard from Claire and the support team and we hope that in the coming weeks, you’ll notice and appreciate some of the efforts they’ve been working on.
Have you interacted with our support team lately? How did we do? What could we do better?
If you’re a fan of the Discovery Channel, you may have seen our very own Lucas Cochrane during Daily Planet’s, “Future Tech” a new segment that covers Tech, Gaming and Social Media.
As is also the tradition here on the blog, I’ll now provide some interesting insights and facts about what we do on long weekends in Canada so that we can further some stereotypes about Canadians.