Customer Happiness Report (October 2013)

October – a beautiful month where seasons are changing around the world, and people are gearing up for the holidays. Speaking of change, we’ve listened to feedback from our previous happiness report and are going to try and mix up the format of our report here. First though, something familiar, let’s recap our month here at WooThemes.

As October started all of us convened in the beautiful city of Leiden to attend the first ever WordCamp Europe and our  WooTrip 2013. That was a fantastic way to kick off our month. Once back, fully energized and inspired, we launched Canvas 5.5 with significant updates to what our Canvas lovers wanted most. Not sitting still, we put out a very well received theme called Maximize, a beautifully designed theme that shows off your great images. There was action on the WooCommerce front as well. We announced a new partnership with FirstData, and had a very diverse drop of extensions. To wrap up the whole month we had a spooky, yet Happy HalloWOOn sale.

In between all of that action we published some good knowledge as well. First was a guide to customizing WordPress, then we welcomed our new, amazing ninja Roy! Finally there is a great read on why WordPress 3.7 might be the best release yet. Now let’s get to the happiness!

We’re very pleased with our satisfaction score this month, we’ve gone up to 89% for an increase of 1%. Ever so closer to breaking past 90% in our rollup! That’s been our goal for some time to get back to and past 90% satisfaction. While our satisfaction went up our ticket times did suffer due to our week during the WooTrip. We did have all of us working on tickets, but we all couldn’t possibly work full time and enjoy WordCamp Europe and bonding more with our team. Just for comparison here is October minus the week of the WooTrip. Much faster times while in our normal working environment.

We always receive some really great feedback as well during each month, so I’d thought I’d share a few of our favorites. The ones that really make our day when working with each of you. If you are reading this and left us that feedback, thank you very much. Like I said, it makes our day to hear that we are appreciated and doing great work. 🙂

BTW, Canvas just keeps getting better. Our company loves the new changes that you guys have rolled out. It’s now our main theme that we use in 90% of our web designs. Keep up the awesome work!

Superb! It’s forward thinking customer service like this this that keeps me coming back to WooThemes!

WOW! you just blew my mind!!! Thank you so much. That was very kind! Makes me want to put WooThemes branding all over my site just to let people know how cool your team is!

Don’t run away now that I’ve mentioned numbers, I think these are still important metrics to publish and be transparent about. It’ll be as interesting as possible! As mentioned, our WooTrip dings our numbers yet is such a worthy trip for the strength of WooThemes. We appreciate your understanding and patience while doing these sorts of trips. So much good comes from it that you eventually will benefit from, just give it time. 😉

• 8,922 new tickets created this month. Up 376.
• 24,224 ticket touches. Up 47. (how many times all tickets were opened, tickets with multiple responses, or re-assigned, etc…)
• 33.30 hours to First Response. Up 5.8 hours. (the amount of time the average customer waits for our first response).
• 53% of all tickets are responded to within 24 hours. Down 13%; and
• 89% satisfaction rating on all tickets. Up 1%

I thought it’d be fun to start paying attention to this chart. It’s measured by the number of tickets marked as solved. It doesn’t account for tickets marked pending, on hold, new, or open. So whoever solves the most tickets gets the highest numbers.

Things to keep in mind, 1st through 4th place is our Accounts team. The nature of our tickets means we can more easily solve more tickets. We luckily aren’t dealing with the complexities of theme, plugin, or WooCommerce support tickets. From 5th to 10th is actually a mix of our Support and WooCommerce team. Finally from 5th down to 12th has only a 70 ticket difference. So it’s a really tight squeeze between 5th and 10th. If you were to even take about 3 days off you could easily go from 5th to 15th. I’d expect that 1st – 4th on this list isn’t very volatile, but 5th through 10th will ever be changing depending on who’s on leave and who’s picking up the slack in support.

We’ve been over the happiness and discussed numbers in a different way, so what can we take away from all of this? Here are our goals for the coming month:

• Keep our overall satisfaction score at 90%, make sure to raise our three groups to 90% or above as well!
• Make up for our ticket times from WooTrip 2013. Get all groups back to normal response times.
• Experiment with new ways to better answer our most complex tickets. Meaning quick, high quality answers.

Some ideas and new techniques are already being put into place to try and accomplish the above goals. I think November is shaping up to be a great month for our support team!

About

Mark Forrester

I'm a proud co-founder of WooThemes, based at our headquarters in beautiful Cape Town. I'm also a keen photographer, goofy dad and avid sports fan.

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