Peerless WordPress Support.
Over two years the improvement in average support response time dropped from 46hrs to 7hrs. How did we do that?
Making such a massive improvement was actually quite straightforward, although quite painful.
I could say we “cared more about clients” or that we introduced our own version of “agile support” or “a root and branch restructure of support” but that might miss the real point.
For the first year we were just happy to get the response time down to 24hrs. This was tough as we had to lose a lot of legacy baggage, process and people. Support also seemed happy to comply with our 24hr target figure and little inspiration was shown to improve it.
For those on the team, support (especially WordPress support) seemed to be the poor relation of “exciting development”. Bottom line, it had the least qualified and poorly motivated looking after it. A year ago, support changed again.
WordPress Support reboots to become Peerless WordPress Support
This time we had an identity (Peerless WordPress Support) and a mantra of loving clients. At the same time we loosened the purse strings and invested in new people whom came in fresh and fired up with the love of great support.
We changed how we spoke to clients and you could see the “end of gaming” as client responses became a lot more genuinely helpful, rather than responding to hit a defined target.
If you think getting the average first response time down from 46hrs to 24hrs in the first year was impressive then getting 10 hrs response is magic.
The response time is not based on working hours, it’s actual hours. A support email, ticket or tweet logged at 2am sets the clock running from then, not when the standard support window opens at 10am.
Transparency is the driver
The team are the folks that make this happen, our clients feel that love and attention and share it with others. However, we’ve reached where we are as a direct result of sharing our performance out in the open.
We were the first WordPress Agency to openly share, and as far as we know, we are the only agency that takes this transparent approach. In the absence of relative data from other agencies, we benchmark ourselves against IT support companies and stack up pretty well against dedicated IT support.
In fact we deal with more tickets per person, have a much quicker response time and a higher client satisfaction rate than 95% of support companies in our pool (as defined by Zendesk’s Customer Service Benchmark).
Support. You gotta love it.
