UK hosting provider Fasthosts released today findings from a customer service survey. Their study concluded that 78% of consumers are failed by slow customer service emails. What I found most compelling was that 'waiting too long for a useful reply' was a key complaint. Preventing the latter has always been a key goal here at rackAID.
One thing we've been trying to do is to develop standardized request procedures for soliciting information. In a review our our service tickets, we found that in 70% of cases we exchange more than three rounds of questions and answers just to get the information we require to work on a job. These exchanges can delay the resolution of a problem significantly.
We've considered introducing forms to help with data collection but nobody likes filling out tedious forms. However, using task-specific forms could significantly lower the time to a resolution.
For example, a recent issue with a PHP Pear module was resolved within 5 minutes after receiving the proper information. However, it took us nearly 14 hours to get the data we required. Meanwhile, the end-user was waiting for a fix.
Our server management subscriptions do provided guaranteed response times ranging from 2 hours to 1 business day, but responding just to meet our SLA has never been our goal. Tickets may hang out in our helpdesk for hours, but your first reply should always be a useful one.
Mark Jeffries, CTO of Fasthosts, makes an excellent point that "the public suffers real stress from slow or sub-standard email replies ...".
Too often, I think we forget the stress that server outages, hacking incidents and other issues cause our clients and their end-users. Perhaps adding an emoticon or a stress meter in our helpdesk could allow our clients to express their feelings. Maybe instead of focusing on response times, we can focus on agitation levels. Highly agitated by some server issue? Then open a stress-relief ticket and someone will call you within the hour. Wonder how much someone would pay for that service?
