March was JFDI month
Process and approvals had seemed to be overtaking the real purpose of support – making our clients lives easier. We’re a progressive digital agency and not some fancy QC organisation adhering to out of date ISO9002 paper-trails so it was time to cut the red-tape.
Whilst we need some structures in place, these should liberate support staff to speed up the process, deliver faster and reduce paperwork. KISS.
Keeping things simple requires continual improvement, as all systems suffer from bloat over time. So we began a concerted drive to cut the approval process by removing an approval/completion layer in ticket management and empowering staff to “just f***ing fix the client problem”. Hey, it seems to have worked!
This had a number of dramatic effects:
- Initial response time improved by 50%, from 16.5hrs to just over 8hrs
- The number of support touches per ticket solved dropped by the same amount, from 2.1 to 1.0
- Support spent 35% less time fixing support queries in March, despite the same 7.4 run-rate per day of new support tickets.
- The average ticket backlog dropped from 11 tickets to 5
March Support Review
It’s been an outstandingly good month for support, but we need to guard against other quality measures slipping. We are, still, running at a 100% satisfaction rate for 2014 and have now solved almost two and a half thousand support tickets since we started using Zendesk in October 2012.
Highlights for March are
- Average ticket response time of 8.5hrs
- 163 tickets solved
- 92% of tickets responded in under 24hrs
- 100% client satisfaction rate
- Support telephone calls dropped to an all-time low. We had just 1.
On the location independent theme, support in March was supplied by staff in London, Leeds, Huddersfield, Halifax and Manchester. Being a location agnostic agency certainly has it’s benefits.
