Peerless WordPress Support Update.
We’re deadly serious about supporting WordPress, and we choose to openly report on our performance as we think that makes us better. Judge for yourself.
We’ve used the industry-leading Zendesk Application since 2012 to provide a platform for supporting WordPress clients and to independently measure our performance.
We support a mixture of clients – from fully supported clients that use us as their WordPress agency to clients who use us just for supporting their WordPress platform. They all get (broadly) the same level of service and they’re all supported through Zendesk.
This single-view of WordPress support gives us unique insight into how and what we’re doing, and in conjunction with Zendesk’s Satisfaction Programme, we’re able to measure our performance relative to other heavy-weight support organisations in the digital field.
We are still, as far as we are aware, the only UK-based WordPress agency that openly publishes the data on how much and how well rated our WordPress support is. I suspect if you saw the numbers from many of the other top agencies they wouldn’t stack anywhere near as well.
So here are some (possibly) interesting numbers from the first 6 months of 2015:
Month, Tickets Solved, Support Touches, Client Satisfaction, Response Time, 1hr Response
Jan: 264, 579, 100%, 6.30 hrs, 49%
Feb: 204, 475, 100%, 18.10 hrs, 47%
Mar: 262, 623, 100%, 4.20 hrs, 63%
Apr: 163, 335, 100%, 3.20 hrs, 45%
May: 271, 447, 100%, 12.00 hrs, 45%
Jun: 279, 660, 100%, 8.56 hrs, 51%
That’s a total of almost 1,500 tickets, over 3,000 interactions with an average response time of about 8.5 hours. Impressive (for us) is the percentage of tickets that we pick up in the first “magic hour”. This is all the more impressive as the time is measured on a 24hr clock, not just our standard support operating window.
100% client satisfaction
We’re extremely proud that in every month of this year we’ve scored a 100% client satisfaction rate. That’s not to say we haven’t dropped a ball or two – I’d be lying if I said we’re perfect – but how we react and deal with problems (even of our own causing) and how we communicate that back to our clients is where I think we really shine.
Working out in the open might seem scary to some, when we started publishing our support statistics at the start of 2014 the idea of publishing this information for everyone to see didn’t universally go down well.
And it’s fair to say that at the time our support performance was not stellar, response times were over 24hrs despite lower ticket volumes and client satisfaction was in the 80% range (so 1 in 5 fixes didn’t meet our clients’ expectations).
Keeping is small. Keeping it real.
Our support team is small, it consists of 3 dedicated WordPress Support Engineers and 1 fat controller to manage the workflow. In reality, the workflow is largely self-managed using a rather unique first-come-first-served process that ensures every new ticket has a fair and equal shot at being fixed inside the magic first hour.
We’re not chasing crazy growth: It’s serves no useful purpose for either our clients or ourselves – more often than not it can result in much lower standards of service and a loss of love of our clients. As a result we’re free to grow at a steady rate, managed and resourced well in advance of demand so we’re able to improve the quality of the WordPress support over time.
We rely on a mixture of technology and empowerment to provide peerless support. And we have a “Everything, Everywhere” approach to all aspects of how we run our company. That means that anyone can carry out any function* of the business regardless of where they are or time of day.
*Certain financial and legal functions have to be restricted.
The ultimate compliment
We think we’ve struck a good balance between skills, service-level and communication – and we think the industry agrees as elements of our support ethos and technology platforms is widely copied in the WordPress agency space.
We regard this as a compliment, and don’t stress about the competition. We created the model and we aim to be the first to improve on it. Our goal is to stay a leader in the WordPress support field and to do that we focus our effort 100% on making our client’s lives easier, and better.
If you want to know more about our support infrastructure then please do contact us.
