A glimpse into the world of WooSupport

My name is Danny Santoro – I’m a 24-almost-25 year old WooNinja from Cincinnati, Ohio. I’m lucky enough to work with multiple different areas of WooThemes, from support to the community to videos and more – but ultimately, my goal is to improve the user experience across the board and to make Woo a better company for the people out there who support us and use our products.

We have an interesting setup at WooThemes – our ninjas are distributed around the globe, and we almost never see our customers face-to-face (unless you go to WooConf, of course). This is the main challenge we have with our distributed workflow – sometimes, it’s hard to think that behind the screen names are real people, and sometimes it’s hard to hear a customer in the crowd. That’s why we have an equally interesting approach to counter these setbacks – something lovingly called F.A.C.T.T. – Fun, Action, Communication, Transparency, and Trust.

When I first joined the company back in February, a wise man (our very own Mike Krapf) once said that F.A.C.T.T. was the real “key to successful distributed work”. At the time it was hard to imagine the need for the motto, but in just a short time I realized that it was a lifeline the company stood on as a whole, and something we strive to live up to every day.

We have fun with each other at WooTrips and with the customers during special events. We stay in action by pushing out quality products requested by our users, like our new Canvas Themes, regular product updates, and exciting new products like WooCommerce Social Login. We encourage communication between team members in forums, chat rooms, and hangouts, and we encourage communication with our users in our fledgeling community. We encourage trust with our excellent support team and a 30-day Money Back Guarantee, a one-of-a-kind offer in the industry.

“But Danny!” you say, “What about transparency? You can’t just forget that!”

Don’t worry, I didn’t! Today, we’re going to give you an inside look into what WooSupport is up to, how we’re changing, and maybe even a few sneak peeks into what’s on the horizon.

Support Numbers & Statistics
There’s no better way to be transparent than to show off the raw numbers, so let’s get to it!

In the 30-day period preceding the writing of this post, our Support staff received 6,780 new tickets, sending just under 22,000 personal messages back and forth between users for setup and troubleshooting. That works out to 226 new issues and 730+ responses per day – as a frame of reference, we can look at the industry average number of daily tickets, which hovers around 25 tickets per day… The current daily output each one of our Support Ninjas. Talk about an amazing Support Team – but even more impressive is that we average a 90% Satisfaction Rating, 5% above the industry standard. Not only do we handle more, but we handle it better – your site is in good hands with Woo!

Changes in support structure
I know, I know, we get asked all the time (not really, but stick with me) – “How do you do it, Woo? Do you not sleep? Are you actually robots? Have you guys rigged a DeLorean for time travel?” Not quite! Only one of those applies (taking bets), but we’ve spent some time doing a huge restructure of our support workflow based off of months of experience to get tickets solved as fast as possible.

Our Ninjas are specialists. Like the storybook ninjas they master their art, and it shows – by expanding our support team and then breaking them into dedicated teams like Shipping, Payment, and Enterprise, we can get to tickets faster, we can solve them better, and we can spot trends and issues much earlier than before. We’ve already seen some amazing results – our average response time to get to a ticket has been reduced by 66% from the month when I started, all thanks to the awesome feedback we got from you guys and good old fashioned experience. We’re opening more and more avenues of communication like the Community, the @WooSupport Twitter handle, and a streamlined Knowledge Base, as well as actively monitoring our social media and ideas boards. You name it, we’re working on it… And the best part is we’re just getting started generating the quality content we know you love.

Interesting articles, questions, and tickets
What content, you ask? Good question! Let’s go over some of my favorite new parts of support.

New support initiative – adding value through video
Formerly low in supply but high in demand, we’ve gathered some of our awesome Ninjas together into a not-so-nerdy A/V squad, led by video superstar Ryan Ray (he’s got TWO Blackmagic cameras, guys, that’s so cool). We’ve got some huge plans on the horizon here I can’t share just yet, but I can show off some of the most valuable resources we’ve finished so far – a Troubleshooting 101 video series to solve the common problems we come across in support. No reason to wait for a reply on a support ticket – we’re working to give you guys the power to fix it yourself in less than ten minutes.

Advanced use tutorials
More of a reader than a watcher? Want something to test your skills? No problem there, either! We’ve put out some great walkthroughs with both video AND text, like this article that shows you how to set up WooCommerce to sell your photography, written by yours truly and modeling Lily the cat – it is the internet, after all.

Active ninja blogging
On top of all that, we have some of our super-smart ninjas regularly blogging cool snippets, neat ideas, and sweet tricks to add features to your site – just head over to our constantly growing Tutorials section to see what your site can really do, straight from the best in the biz.

Wrapping it up
I’m excited to say that this is just the beginning of the changes you can expect to see in WooThemes support. We’re huge fans of continual improvement and are ALWAYS looking for ways to make your job easier – If you have any ideas you’d like to share, then we’d love to hear them on our Help Desk forum. As always, we’re here to help – so never hesitate to reach out to us and say hello!