As May ends we’re quickly approaching the halfway mark of 2013. The seasons are starting to turn around the world, and we here at WooThemes have continued to turn up the activity. Our favorite ecommerce plugin, WooCommerce, is also turning up the heat and growing faster and faster. We are quickly approaching 1 MILLION downloads of WooCommerce when we just celebrated 500,000 downloads at the end of January. Stay tuned for news on that.
I’m also happy to announce today that we’ve got two NEW incredible support ninjas. We thought it’d be great to introduce the two of them together with a little interview we did last week. So take a moment to meet Patrick & Rémi.
Now that you’ve heard from them, here is what else we’ve been up to here at WooThemes…
To start May we pumped out 7 new WooCommerce Extensions, and put the call out that we were hiring. We had three awesome case studies on our blog this month too. One on Accounting Bliss, one on Moving from Virtuemart to WooCommerce, and finally one from Judith Hobby Clothing. Around these case studies we’ve also hosted a 10th Anniversary WordPress bash, updated Sensei in a big way, released the awesome theme Peddlar, and had ANOTHER WooCommerce extension drop. We eventually rounded out the month by updating our WooThemes Updater plugin.
I love wrapping up what our WooTeam has done every month, because they are churning out incredible WordPress goods! Now, let’s talk support and our numbers there.
Customer Happiness in Numbers
Looking at the numbers:
- 10,551 new tickets created this month.
- 26,773 ticket touches. (how many times all tickets were opened, tickets with multiple responses, or re-assigned, etc…)
- 39.80 hours to First Response (the amount of time the average customer waits for our first response).
- 35% of all tickets are responded to within 24 hours; and
- 85% satisfaction rating on all tickets.
From April to May it looks like our numbers may have actually normalized a bit. We have seen a decrease in the total amount of tickets and ticket touches, while slowly getting a bit faster at answering tickets. With our two new ninjas getting up to speed on our ticket workflow, we’re expecting that we can continue to increase our satisfaction rating and make our response times faster and faster.
Benchmarking & Context
Again, there isn’t much to share here. Our numbers were very close to identical from April. We unfortunately lost one percent in satisfaction rating, but we’re always aiming to grow that number!
Like we did last month, here are some other metrics we’ve looked at in measuring our support quality. Our top searches have changed with a few things to note. WooCommerce, Sensei, and WooSlider seem to be the popular products this month. We’ve been updating the Sensei documentation this month, especially during it’s big update. So definitely use the feedback buttons on our docs to help us keep making those better. We’ve got some nice things coming for WooSlider, so those docs will be getting a facelift as well! We also have plans in the works to refresh and make submitting a support ticket an easier process. In that is an official refund ticket category. We’ll be sure to outline requesting a refund in our docs and knowledge base once that is live as well.
As we mentioned in our WooThemes Updater post, an easy way to update your WooThemes themes is coming soon. That top article will be updated to reflect that once everything is ready to go! From the next 3 articles it looks like our users were wanting to customize their themes. Especially if done via a child theme, that will make your theme life so much easier. 🙂
Time For Action
To sum up our actionable goals from this month.
- Get our new ninjas up to speed, then release them on our WooCommerce tickets.
- Keep up our pace on doc improvements and knowledge base posts.
- Bring in our response times to our stated times in our support policy
About
you guys really need to improve this , I have ticket which still holding and need to keep asking on twitter in order to get attention on it , it’s been pending forever and causing some over charge on me and no one is reply me how to resolve on the overcharge ?
I think I’ve asked via Twitter, but what is the ticket number please? I’ll check on this ASAP!
I’ve always had good service via woothemes support. When something wasn’t covered under their scope of support they let me know.
It never really bothers me since I have been in the same support scenario as they are and know that one must place limits or others will eat you alive fixing their customizing issues.
We really do appreciate it when others understand the scope of our support.
Like you said, if we did customizations for users after they bought a $50 extension our support would suffer and we ourselves would suffer. We’ve tried partnering with other services and our Affiliated Woo Workers to help out our users looking for customization help. 🙂
Ryan,
I didn’t reply tat tweets because someone reply in the support ticket say will handle it , but again no one reply after some empty promise.
I m respecting you guys and I m a paying customer, I don’t see why I deserve this and need to leave comment here and twitter in order to get someone reply on my ticket.
If this is a flaw for your so call awesome support , please fix it.
I just receive the latest news letter on SENSEI is not working and I would like to really have a look at the demo but it is not possible !
Thanks!
https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1370523567-3be0fffaddc314813ff76a1b4bbabdae-0b81ee6?pa=15719885596
Margo
Please do create a ticket if you have technical issues with Sensei or our themes. – http://woothemes.zendesk.com/requests/new
We’re best suited to help troubleshoot there, thanks!
rubbish.
Customer support for the woocommerce plugin consists of waiting, then blaming UPS for the wrong shipping rates – UPS blames the third party plugin and weeks later we’re still nowhere. The fact is, there is no reason why wrong shipping rates are being pulled except for the faultiness of the plugin. I have done searches and seen this exact same comment on other sites.
Hey Christie,
Sorry to hear you’ve had a bad experience between our products and support! Do you have any open tickets right now we can check in on? Just let us know the ticket number!
Great to know about this. If your customers are happy that means you are really doing good. At times you can not make everyone happy and hence i find some issues using woocommerce.
We know we can’t please everyone, but aim to keep everyone as happy as possible. That’s what we try to highlight in these posts, at the least. 🙂
Please do report any of your issues with WooCommerce to our support team.