July Support Review

By William Bott.

WordPress Support.

300% WordPress support increase in a year. The race is now on.

In the summer last year we had been running our dedicated WordPress Support function for less than a year, but it was starting to pick up and in July 2013 we dealt with 50 support tickets.

Fast forward a year, and July 2014 saw us deal with nearly 180 support requests. Pro-rata that equates to nearly 2,000 support tickets per year and over 6,000 support events or interactions.

We only formally launched our dedicated support function under the “Peerless WordPress Support” banner in spring of this year and what a ride it’s been.

WordPress support for July

With nearly 500 support touches/interactions and a 95% client satisfaction level, we are probably one of the best (as rated by the clients) and largest providers of WordPress Support in the UK.

Our two biggest challenges for the rest of the year are:

  • Keeping up with demand. With have one new WordPress Support expert starting this month and we’re looking for another which would bring team strength to five. This should provide enough capacity to deal with 1,000 support interactions every month.
  • First Responder Time. We’re under 14hrs first-response time in July but that time has moved around erratically as we’ve got busier. Some months it’s dangerously close to our 24hr SLA limit. And it’s better client service if we provide a more consistent response time.

Finally, the need for WordPress support is exploding, almost half of our incoming enquiries revolve around support, guidance or help.

We couldn’t manage successfully this load on support without an excellent team, great agile processes, lovely clients, brilliant suppliers and excellent software & platform apps.

A huge thanks goes out to Zendesk, Podio, Skype, Amazon (AWS), WPEngine and, of course, WordPress.

We have, again, upgraded and enhanced our Zendesk support desk to cope with the increased demand and continue to invest heavily in WordPress Support.