This is a real conundrum for us too. I agree that in a perfect world, all question-causing things in your product are dealt with by better product development. But time from the folks who need to do the development work is hard to come by. So I’m like “Okay, can’t wait to see this new, perfect, shiny feature. But in the meantime, here’s a help doc.”

Yeah, I think users do dislike being responded to by different people who may or may not know what’s going on with the issue, but we try to read every ticket SUPER thoroughly to avoid reinventing the wheel with every response. I think what I’ve found is that users hate waiting a long time for a response even more than they hate multiple…[Read more]

We do it the other way — any Support agent can answer any ticket that’s waiting in the queue. We’re a very small team dealing with a lot of volume and various work shifts, so this helps us keep the queue under control no matter who’s currently working. I think there are certainly downsides to it. Ownership over a given ticket from start to finish…[Read more]

@evan I wish! Have an amazing time though. Can’t wait to hear all about it!

Thanks everyone. It’s been so helpful to hear what others are doing, and kind of validating that it’s a hard thing for y’all to tackle too. One other question: Can anyone think of any downsides to having peer reviews? I don’t want to make the quality reporting process dependent on just me managing to review tickets from the 11 people I directly…[Read more]

365 days a year, as someone’s always willing to volunteer to work a holiday. We don’t have any customer-facing “official” hours, but on a given weekday humans are manning the ticket queue from about 7am to after 10pm. If you’re on regular days, you work until somewhere between 4 and 6pm, and if you’re on evening rotation you generally work 2pm -…[Read more]

From a correctness and fairness perspective, I hate the idea of “the customer is always right” because as you know, the customer is not allllways right. But taking the blame helps and doesn’t have to actually be true. It doesn’t matter if the frustration is your fault or not; you can say it is, and let them feel triumphant. The point is that they…[Read more]

I don’t really notice the changes much, which I guess is a good thing if you’re concerned about people not liking them! Seems fine to me.

We provide native-speaker support for a few languages, and I would consider that important for languages where you’re seeing a large volume. But for more obscure languages as far as volume goes, we have a response stating that we can only provide support in English at this address but that they’re welcome to email one of our other addresses for…[Read more]

I’m really interested in this question as well, though I don’t have good advice to offer up for it. We have a pretty complex weekly rotation to cover weekends, weekdays, and evenings, and we just keep track of it […]

Oh man. These are all such great tips. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Here’s my stab:

Respond as you would like to be responded to, regardless of the user’s initial attitude. Life’s too short to […]

Totally agree @jason. And while it’s always nice to add reports for additional context, this isn’t one that we place a ton of importance on. Definitely nice to see when there are any huge discrepancies between […]

@lindsaygor We do, at the moment via a built-in metric for “one-touch tickets” through GoodData. Looks like their metric is defined as solved tickets where # of replies is <= 1. We track this by agent, on a daily, […]

Thanks Evan, loving the forum so far. My intro:
1. What do you do?
Director of Support at Tumblr. Striving to answer a bajillion tickets with a small team, as well as provide other services as needed internally. […]

We get so many requests every week that it would be hard to research and get an “answer” on each one, but the ones that the users are most enthusiastic about do bubble up. Then those will get reported to […]

Batman, but if we’re allowed to pick a favorite villain, Dr. Horrible obviously.