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Last Month In Support – August 2014

Hi!

Time for another monthly (ish) newsletter. So many tickets, so little time!

What’s the ticket volume been like?

In the last 30 days we’ve had 938 “conversations” with customers, right around the same as the 30 day period before it. For contrast, though, the month of June had about 750 conversations, so there is a definite upward trend.

We’ve had a few spikes here and there with outages and the like, but nothing major. Despite the lack of big spike in ticket numbers (compared to last month), it’s definitely felt busier. Lots more phone calls or big multi-hour tickets for customers who need pretty complex questions answered. The best type of tickets, but also the most time consuming!

I’m working on a plan to help deal with the increasing busyness, though. My hope is to get a slow day some time soon and have a good chunk of time to review all of the quicker questions and add/edit docs as needed to help with them. In the future, if we’re able to add an automated doc search when someone goes to contact us right in the app, that would be a huge help.

The other main area I’m working on is adding more saved replies in Help Scout. Remember to check those before replying, most frequent questions (can you a/b test newsletters, how do I test emails with event data, can I attach files to my campaign, etc) now have a reply saved and should help speed up getting back to customers. I generally make a point of editing the reply before sending, but it’s still a large timesaver for those popular questions. I’m also paying close attention to customer replies or feedback ratings when those saved replies are used. I want to make sure they’re still coming across as friendly and helpful and tweaking as needed if people are confused. If you reply to something that seems a bit more general (rather than specific to that user’s account) feel free to save it as a reply too and keep adding to the saved reply list.

Any other ideas to improve reply times or cut down on questions are welcome!

Ratings?

Ratings in Nicereply have had a few bumps and bruises over the last month, mostly due to slower reply times based on comments or later replies to the ticket. That said, though, our average is still 9.8. Tough to be upset with that!

We’ve also gotten some great feedback from very happy customers, though, and every one on the team is doing an amazing job!

Some samples:

“Awesome! It was a very kind gesture to manually do for me something that you guys are currently implementing. You helped me today and, with the new feature, you’re going to keep on helping me with good software. That’s a lesson you’ve given me on how to do well by your users and make software that actually responds to their needs. Congrats!” To Henry

“I’m so appreciative of the incredibly helpful and quick response!” To Jon

“Thank you! I can’t believe I got a reply from the CEO – you guys rock! Being in marketing, I’m glad I could help, I’d want someone to tell me the same 🙂 Have a great night, and talk soon!”To Colin

Nicereply

Ticket Types?

For the last 30 days, the majority of tickets types have either revolved around V3 (bugs or feature requests) or sales type questions (generally people who either want an overview or who aren’t customers yet but want a little handholding with their initial set up). Seems like a decent number of those more involved sales-y tickets have lead to new signups as well, including XXXXXX (redacted) (who is still in the setup phase) with nearly 4 million users.

We’ve also had a pretty decent spike in just general bug reports or people running into segment issues. That’s likely a leading factor in the busyness!

The perennial favorite of questions about segment triggered campaigns didn’t even crack the top 10 this month. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’ll be interesting to see if it’s more of a tagging change (if more end up being tracked as sales) or a longer term trend.

Feature Requests?

We’ve received 19 feature requests in the last month. It’s a bit of a drop against previous months. I suspect part of that is more people are using V3 and not needing to write in asking for features we’ve already created :).

As always, I’d love to know if there is more information you’d like to see. Just let me know!