Let’s talk about that. But first, what is GOOD support?
What customers expect from any helpdesk? What is the “most wanted” amongst all customers’ requirements?
According to majority Customer Satisfaction Surveys, the most important and valued factor is time. Around 70% of people believe that valuing their time is the most important thing in any online customer experience.
Let’s talk about time
Obviously, time is important in any kind of online business. Nowadays, with the fast and available almost everywhere internet, this is the main thing that differs online from the “old-fashioned” business. No wonder, for all of us, “online” is also a synonym of “fast”. It seems that selling and supporting a very vibrant and highly dynamic product that needs to be “very much alive” and efficient all the time, right from the start, is even more demanding. PeepSo is one of them.
We, at PeepSo are aware of that. We are working hard on it. Everyday. That’s why we introduced “doubled” support on weekends in May. They are now not one but two engineers working 16 hours in total during each weekend. And, as you may already know, our Support Team is growing. The new tech guy is starting in June, as he is at the final stage of his training now. And as you could see on our site we are hiring even more engineers.
Let’s dive into some examples of how our support team deals with time
Here is the 1st ticket transcript:
- Customer (16:30 GMT+2):
Hi, Is there any settings I need to configure wherein the post with latest comments or reactions go on top of the stream? Thank you
- PeepSo (05:30 GMT+2):
Hi, Thank you for contacting us about this. Unfortunately, that is not possible at the moment, but probably you can use Pinned post feature to make certain post go on top of the stream. Hope this helps and please let me know if you need further assistance.
- Customer (05:45 GMT+2):
Post with latest comments or reactions go on top is a very useful feature for a social network like this. This is the same with Facebook. This feature should also have with PeepSo. Thank you.
- PeepSo (07:00 GMT+2):
Hi, Thank you for your suggestion. I’ll create an internal dev ticket about it and see if we can do this in the future. I’ll close this support ticket and please open new support ticket if you need our assistance.
As you can see, this ticket was opened just after our European team finished work, and when it was a late-night (21:30 local time) for our team in Asia. Which is, from the PeepSo customer’s point of view, the worst-case scenario.
In spite of that, we sent our first reply after 13 hours, and the ticket was closed after 26.5 hours.
Additionally, as you can see, we not only answered the question, but we also took on board the customer’s idea. We are always open for the suggestions and ideas about how to improve and make PeepSo even better.
And the 2nd example (short version this time, wouldn’t wanna bore you):
- Customer (22:30 GMT+2) opens a ticket with 7 technically advanced questions.
- PeepSo (13:00 GMT+2) the first reply.
- Customer (14:00 GMT+2) replies and asks the additional question.
- Customer 20:30 GMT+2) sends another question.
- Customer (17:00 GMT+2) opens a brand new Emergency ticket:
“I am not getting any support for my ticket! Should I just request a refund? And go with your competitors. “
- PeepSo (17:09 GMT+2) replies to all questions.
As you can see in this example, sometimes, even if we do our best, for some customers our support is not fast enough.
This ticket was opened at 22:30 of our European team time, when it was 04:30 local time for our team in Asia. Again, obviously not very good timing from the customer’s point of view.
But, we sent our first reply after 14.5 hours, and the second-final reply, after 42.5 hours since the ticket was opened, or after 20.5 hours since we received the last question.
You probably also noted this: as they were 9 technical advanced questions, we were working on them for some time, and obviously we didn’t find all answers in 9 minutes, just after we received a “warning” from the customer.
Could we perform better in this case? Well, at the moment, probably we couldn’t.
Did we deserve to be threatened like this? Well… you tell us.
So, do we respond fast?
Of course, there’s a difference between the time it takes to respond and the time it takes to resolve the problem.
Several years ago, STELLAService conducted a response time report and found that the average email response time for the top 100 retail companies was 17 hours.
Now, if you google: “the average response time to respond to customers”, you will find that the most common answer is: around 12 hours. Our April’s statistics show that the average time for the first reply was 10 hours, and the average time for all replies was 42 hours.
In some cases we do ask clients to wait longer as we investigate some issues. That’s why replies to some tickets take more time which in return lengthens our average response time stats. Take those few cases out of it and it seems that we are not so bad at what we do. Especially taking into consideration time zone differences. Can we perform better? Yes, we can. And we will.
Please do let us know what was your experience with our support in the comments below.
