Here we are once again. June is over so let’s do a quick wrap up of everything we’ve been doing here. It’s definitely been another busy month, but what else would you expect from us? Obviously, we know July will be no different so checkout what we were up to in June real quick before July passes us by!
Starting out we released our latest theme, On Topic. One of my personal favorites, it was designed and built in house! We featured a couple of collaborative posts in an effort to share more awesome WordPress & WooThemes related products. First up we had ManageWP making it easy to manage your site, followed by Wysija who put a little Woo in their newsletter plugin, and finally from Tweaky.com who showed us how to create custom reports for your content & social media marketing.
Outside of that we posted some free ecommerce icons, launched our themes on CreativeMarket, ran a quick Facebook contest, showed you how we use version control on our own site, added support for Twitter’s new API into WooDojo, released the points & rewards extension, celebrated a huge milestone of 1 million WooCommerce downloads, had another roundup of free WooCommerce extensions, and finally had a classic WooCommerce extension drop. Whew, let’s take a moment now to take a deep breath and see how we did supporting all of this!
Customer Happiness in Numbers
Looking at the numbers:
- 10,877 new tickets created this month. Up 326.
- 27,153 ticket touches. Up 380. (how many times all tickets were opened, tickets with multiple responses, or re-assigned, etc…)
- 41.30 hours to First Response. Up 1.5 hours. (the amount of time the average customer waits for our first response).
- 40% of all tickets are responded to within 24 hours. Up 5%; and
- 88% satisfaction rating on all tickets. Up 3%
I’ve added the difference between May’s to these numbers, and started showing the breakdowns between our 3 biggest channels as well. Hopefully that helps you see some actual differences now. We’ve received more tickets this month, and consequently have had more touches as well. Even though we peaked over 40+ hours now in our average response time, it was only a 1.5 hours increase with the increase in touches and tickets. If you look at the chart above, blue is new tickets and green is solved tickets. We really modified some of our workflows near the last week of June and you can see that we are keeping up with new tickets much better now as each week goes on. Something we plan to keep up with! All in all, we did make improvements in getting more tickets answered within 24 hours and increase our satisfaction rating.
Benchmarking & Context
Very happy to be back closer to 90% on our satisfaction ratings, even with tackling more tickets than last month. We may have been slightly slower, but we made big leaps in making sure satisfaction was better!
I like sharing these parts of our metrics to show you a little bit of what we’re working on to meet the needs represented here. We’ve mentioned before that we’re working on a proper way to update your themes, just like our plugins do. Also in reply to our top searches we’ve got big improvements coming to WooSlider, we mentioned above how we fixed our Twitter plugin in WooDojo, and we just released an update to Canvas. Particularly speaking to the last top article, there are improvements in using Hooks and Filters in Canvas. 🙂
Bonus
I wanted to have a little section here to talk about a conference a few of us attended called Open Help. It was a conference meant to bring together leaders in open source project to talk about documentation for their community. That could simply be user, or both users and developers. Three of us went to attend the conference over the weekend, and then join the WordPress group in talking about the codex and how to make WordPress’ docs much better. Our group was organized by the ever lovely Siobhan, who has been an enormous help on our own docs.
We found that throughout the open source community a lot of us are facing the same challenges in documentation and support. It was semi relieving to know others have the same challenges and struggles as us, a bit of sympathy was shared throughout the conference and our WordPress group.
The biggest part of the conference, for us at the least, was joining the WordPress group and helping shape the future of the codex. We had a lot of brainstorming, as well as good and hard conversations about things we like and dislike about the codex. What underlying systems would make it better, how to organize the content, update it, etc… We got through all of those chores with a 2 year roadmap and a plan to make WordPress documentation even better!
I know I walked away with some new friends and a further sense about the great open source community. We try to do as much as we can here within WooThemes, that we sometimes forget the bigger ecosystem we are a part of. I think through things like the Open Help conference, Word Camps, etc…, we continue to learn the value of giving back to what, at the core, makes WooThemes possible in the first place.
Anyone can do so as well, so checkout the Make WordPress site to find a place to get involved.
Time For Action
Our actionable goals for this month.
- Bring in our response times to our stated times in our support policy.
- Keep watching satisfaction, see if we can’t continue to get closer to 90%
- Bring ticket touches down, which means trying to solve tickets in 1 or 2 responses. Which should boost satisfaction. 🙂
Squeezing in a last second graphic to brag on our team. We drilled down into the latest week of our stats and you can already see marked improvement in the numbers. We’re sharing this not only to show you that improvement is actually being made, but to keep ourselves accountable for July as well. We need to keep those types of numbers going!
About
To be honest I think it would be better if you stopped reporting happiness. I get a resolution from 1 with maybe 1 out of every 10 support tickets MAX. Usually I just give up and either do a workaround or get a developer.
For example, one of my latest tickets, I reported that I was unable to update plugins even by FTP. The woo ninja replied with ‘you cant update even by FTP? that’s weird’ and marked the ticket solved.
It’s just a total waste of time.
There’s no way I’m going to waste even more of my time by submitting to your clearly fake happiness reports.
Their happiness reports are based on what customers select in the followup email after a ticket is closed. The rest of the numbers are also from their Zendesk account. It’s not a matter of «faking.» It’s their actual numbers.
No offense, but if you uploaded the updated the theme files by FTP, then the theme IS updated! There’s no such thing as «can’t update even by FTP»! It’s possible that you wouldn’t be able to upload the files via FTP. But if that’s the problem, then you need to talk to your host’s support, not Woo support. Though the agent might have handled it better, there wasn’t much else to be said.
To me support is a huge factor in whether or not I buy products. WooTheme’s overall record in support has been very good for me personally, and it’s one of the main reasons I remain a loyal customer and recommend them whenever/wherever I can. As their numbers show, I’m not the only one.
Maire, can you please contact us regarding this issue? I’d like to look into this more.
Thanks!
Please reinstate the subscriber discount coupon. For us long-term customers it was something that provided a lot of goodwill, it also resulted in me buying more extensions than I probably would have bought without it.
Agreed. I noticed that it was switched off this week – there was no announcement or anything and truth be told, it was the only thing that kept us here; The themes alone are not enough to cut it.
And what about the «Playground» !?!
I can’t even find the page, where is it?
It was good to test the themes before making a decision.
Hi there,
We’ve stopped using the playground since we’ve had our 30 day refund policy.
Our thoughts are to improve our pre-sales pages, FAQs, etc… so there is no need to test our products. And with purchasing a product you have full access to test and tweak a theme, for example, which you couldn’t do on the playground.
Yes but there is 1 difference in these 2 methods: PAYING the MONEY.
«playground» is a pre-sale process,
«30-day refund» is an after-sale operation…
In the newest «refund» way, users HAVE to choose the theme and PAY the amount before begining to test. When not satisfied, wait for a refund and pray for no issues!
But the playground was useful in that «choosing» period to decide the theme and WITHOUT paying anything users can test every theme. And when decision is made, PAY the amount and get that pre-tested theme. If not satisfied, NO NEED to try to get the money back, no refund-processes; nothing; just try testing another theme…
So I don’t agree with you in that «no need to test our products» idea. Because EVERY product is needed to be tested.
You can offer both ways, first test in playground, then a 30-day refund. That would be a better idea…
You buy from companies / people you trust. If you don’t trust Woo, just don’t buy from them. For me it is absolutely no problem to buy something to test it out. If I don’t like it, I get my money back. I trust them.
That said, Woo is a business. All off those testing things are a huge hassle & in the end is only used by people that spend the least amount off money, ask the most questions etc. etc.
If you run a business you want to weed out those «customers».
Definitely understood.
We’ve actually had better luck with our refund policy and no playground then we did with the playground and no refund policy. 🙂
It was often that our playground was just abused. Users would build client sites on there, to completion, and often be upset that the playground reset itself every two weeks.
We had to maintain the playground itself, maintain users accounts on the playground (if signups didn’t work), help users export content that they built there, etc… It ended up not being worth the cost of upkeep unfortunately, as I mentioned above we’ve had better luck without it.
Our refund policy is no questions asked, you want a refund and it’s been 30 days or less you get your refund ASAP!
Hi there, I can appreciate you prioritizing paying customers. I have to report that I am experience a massive ‘barrier to entry’ to becoming such a paying customer, and getting to enjoy this wow-level customer service. I sent money 2 days ago for the purchase of an integration, and have had no response at all since. Could someone *please* get back to me?