The Support Superman

This is how I actually talk to my clients:

Vlad Mazek, Direct CEO Line

As you may remember from our last newsletter, we have put in a lot of effort into the communications, support and documentation of all Own Web Now Corp products. As we grow, and as we scale, it is important to get good documentation and to back it, 24/7 when problems come up. We now have more people working in our helpdesk at support.ownwebnow.com and during December we have both decreased the time to ticket response as well as the time to full case resolution. We have provided more options for support, far better documentation if you wish to do it on your own and our blogs for NOC, Help and Company have all had a number of posts to help you stay in touch, at all times.

However, as we grow and scale and you work with more and more new names, the personal rep that has been built up over the years of business doesn’t extend to the new people you see handling your issues. While I am proud to say that our support today is better than it ever has been before, and that our satisfaction ratings are at the all time highs, I too have seen some complaints from people that miss the old fashioned way of dealing with issues when they come up. We know everything that isn’t working 100% is urgent, we know you want a response right away and we know you want a quality response. Trouble ticket responses are dry, lacking any wit and body language that comes when you’re working with someone you know.

So if things are ever getting out of hand, if you are just not happy with how your issue is being handled, if you have a recommendation that you think would help us, I am here for you. I want to hear from you. We have worked very hard to establish our reputation, to partner with you, to deliver these phenomenal products – and sometimes emails and support tickets can lead to a misunderstanding.

So please, give me an opportunity to make it right. Feel free to call me direct and leave a message if I am away from the desk, I will call you back within 24 hours: xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Things have been going well, very well at Own Web Now. I’ve blogged previously about some of the issues and complaints we’ve received and we’ve done our best to correct a lot of these items.

Still, we struggle with the perennial one man “I can fix anything by myself in 3 minutes” that just can’t comprehend how things work in larger organizations, that the purpose of helpdesk is to provide an answer as quickly as possible, that there are policies and procedures in place to handle things and keep the playing field leveled for everyone. When we ran our profiler to match the complaints to the system users, I believe something like 80% of the complaints came from the one man shops. It was also ridiculous to see that the same percentage of people accounted for over half of all the support cases. Anyhow, I have worked my ass off to make sure our support, documentation and communication are top notch.

I’m kind of the top of that food chain. The big Mayor McCheese if you will. If my clients are not liking the answers they get, if they don’t feel like they are treated with respect, if they aren’t getting the support that they want… well, now I’ve given them a direct line to me so we can handle things before they spiral out of control.

Personal service doesn’t have to fall to pieces just because the company has grown beyond the single person rendering that service.

2008 Will Be The Year of KPI

No, not a calendar featuring Karl Palachuk, though I’m sure now that I mentioned it, one will be in print tomorrow. 🙂

For 2008, my major area of focus will be improving the crappy key performance indicators we currently have in place for our service metrics. I literally have 10 numbers I look at (newest ticket, oldest ticket, tickets closed today, tickets opened today, number of tickets with multiple updates, urgent tickets covered by SLA, high tickets covered by SLA and something else) or basically not enough. So stepping it up, big time.