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About the Author
Mitch (@mitchellharper) is the co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce. Way back in 2007 he built what eventually became BigCommerce as you know it. Today he runs the company alongside Eddie and along with our 100+ team members, is passionate about helping businesses succeed with e-commerce. Mitch spends time between our Sydney and Austin offices and is giving the keynote at TechConnect 2012 in Sydney on April 19th. |
When it comes to improving the different departments in our company, we live by this quote:
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure”
This is especially true for customer-facing departments such as sales and support. I’ve always seen support as a function of marketing, meaning that if we can really knock your socks of with fast, accurate support, that will essentially mean (hopefully) you’ll become an advocate for BigCommerce, telling your friends and colleagues not only that we’ve got a good product but also that we’ve got great support.
So instead of putting $1 into a radio advertising campaign, for example, we would (and do) get a better return by investing it in improving our support.
Anyway, what I want to do in this blog post is share exactly how we’ve been doing on the support side of things over the last 6 months. We’ve grown a lot in that time, both in terms of clients (we’ve added over 5,000 new paying clients in 2010), staff (we’re looking at new offices in Austin to keep up with growth in headcount moving into 2011 – no outsourcing here) and features (BigCommerce 6 is doing great guns).
Overall Rating Of Our Support Department By Our Clients
Based on responses to our support survey (shown and explained below), I’d estimate that the average overall rating of our support department by our clients would be a B-. I share my thoughts on this score below and what we’re planning to improve to get this to an A+.
How We Measure Our Support Effectiveness
Getting back to the quote above about not being able to manage what you can’t measure, let me quickly share with you how we actually measure our support effectiveness – and it’s nothing fancy, believe me. But it works.
When you send in a support ticket or call in, you’ll automatically receive a follow up email when your ticket is closed (either by one of our support ninjas or automatically by our system after 30 days if it’s placed on hold). We run our support department using Kayako but being a PHP shop we’ve hacked and modded it quite a bit to get it to work how we need it to. Oh, we also use SugarCRM for accounts, and they’re linked in the background by our development warriors.
The automatic follow up email links you to a simple survey we’ve setup using Survey Gizmo. It asks you a few multi-choice questions about your experience on that particular support ticket and gives you the option to leave your email for follow up. Nothing that’s rocket science here.
Every quarter we export and collate the feedback and use it to measure the performance of our support department. Internally we of course have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for management and each of our support ninjas, and the survey feedback is also a great way for us to make sure we’re actually setting the right KPIs for our team and that they’re making a difference.
How We’ve Done In The First Half Of 2010
Let’s jump right into the numbers. The question is shown in the dropdown of each screenshot and the answers are broken down as both a chart and percentages. Note that questions are asked about the response of the support ninja. For example if you see “communication skills” in the dropdown, the question in the survey was “How would you rate the communication skills of the person who assisted you with your issue?”.
Also note that responses in the right hand column are sorted from most selected to least selected.
My Interpretation Of The Survey Results
For all but one question, around 90% of responses were average, good or excellent, with every question we asked having the most popular response as excellent. The one set of responses that jumps out at us is the question around time to resolve issues:
The feedback here is crystal clear: one in five clients surveyed said we’re doing a poor job of resolving issues in a timely manner. Although 71% of clients rated our time to resolve their issue as average, good or excellent, our goal as a company is to get 100% of clients answering this question with “Excellent”.
The good news is that we’re well on our way to doing just that. Here’s how:
- About 2 months ago we started opening our office for support on Saturdays from 9am to 2pm
- Shortly we will add Sundays into the mix as well
- We’ll then continue to work towards our goal of 24/7 support
Implementing a 24/7 support system isn’t easy, but it’s the next logical step in our march towards a 100% satisfaction rate for our support department and I believe it’s an absolute necessity for a software company like us.
We’re currently ramping our roster of support ninjas (if you’re in Austin and love the idea of being called a ninja, see our careers page) and systems in preparation, and I’m confident we’ll get there sooner rather than later. We’re a company on a mission, and that mission is to wow the hell out of you with not just our software but also with our pre and post-sales communication via phone and email.
Finally, transparency is king to us. Sure the results from our support survey weren’t perfect, but I believe you have a right to see them anyway and I believe it’s out duty to honestly inform you of how we’re doing as a company and the steps we’re taking to improve, so that’s why I’ve spent the last two or so hours putting together this blog post.
“To infinity and beyond!” – Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story
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