As we charge down to the end of the year, we expect the ticket volume to fall away and, sure enough, total new tickets in November was 137 taking the total number of tickets to just over 1,300 for the year.
First response was truly impressive with 97% of new tickets being responded to within 24hrs – our service level agreement (SLA) states that 85% of tickets will be responded to within 24hrs.
Some significant changes were made to how support was managed during November:
Zombie Ticket Management
To deal with tickets that wouldn’t die, or client tickets that loitered around with no intention of ever going to the grave. We instigated a “death clock” into every ticket that remains untouched for 14 days – on the basis that the problem cannot be serious or must have gone away if it remains completely untouched for that period of time
WordPress Automated Upgrades
For client’s on full support contracts, we’re now automatically upgrading the installations to the latest versions. In November’s case this was moving the first 20 site installations to WordPress 3.7.1
Christmas and New Year Support
Holiday Period
Close: Friday 20th December (lunchtime)
Open: Monday 6th January
Last change requests for 2013 need to be provided by 13th December.
Support
Working hours support is available across the period as determined by contract. Non-working days are:
December 2013: 24th, 25th, 26th and 31st
January 2014: 1st and 2nd
Extended support will be maintained, regardless of shutdown and non-working days. You can access our secure support portal here.
Growth of new support channels
Interesting to note is the rise of alternative channels, email is still the biggest incoming channel with nearly half of all support requests and around 1/6th came directly from our web-site but what’s interesting is the rise of Twitter direct messaging and mentions, collectively they represent 1/3rd of incoming requests. There is a caveat here, we encourage Twitter as an incoming communication medium and our recent growth has driven our need to hire and that in turn has driven support communication through the Twitter channel.
Regardless, we expect Twitter to be a substantial channel to support into 2014 and beyond – it’s easier, faster and more reliable than email. It is also easier to support out of hours and 24×7.
If you fancy trying it out simply mention us (Connected_uk) in a Tweet and you’re likely to get a response from our support team.
New teamies
November saw John and Gyles join the team and settle in fantastically quickly. Gyles looks after the challenges we face from the Social Media world and also SEO, whilst John is sinking his teeth into WordPress at a deep technical level. Both are based in Yorkshire and bring 20+ years of experience with them. With five new web-sites going live in December, both are pretty busy in the run up to Christmas.
Nick, who joined us in 2009, has also had an interesting month as he’s being trained up to better understand the WordPress world and has made a serious contribution to both delivery and deployment across November. Andy, who’s been with us for over 8 years, has made the move out of front-line support and is now pursuing a number of external projects, supported by us.
