Peerless WordPress Support Report for 2015

Peerless WordPress Support.

We are the only WordPress Agency in Europe to publish in-depth support statistics openly. We have done this since 2012 – So here are the annual numbers for 2015.

Three thousand three hundred support tickets, a response time under ten hours and an almost perfect 99.5% client satisfaction rating. We’re extremely proud of our WordPress Support record, and I think quite rightly so.

2015 was our second full year of being independently audited by Zendesk, they measure us against similar support organisations around the globe, and it’s how we measure our performance – relative to other organisations and our historical performance. We rank in the top 10% of all support organisations in the world.

The numbers speak for themselves and the team behind support deserve a special mention. Thanks a million to Aaron, Carl, Jimmy, Matthew, Owen, Shannon and Tom – they have all played their role in supporting our clients during 2015. And say hello to Dave and Sam, who both join us in January to bolster our support team.

So, in 2015, we solved 3,301 support tickets in an average of 9 hrs 51 mins. Support technicians had 7,189 interactions with our clients and scored a super impressive 99.5% satisfaction score.

This is about 45% more tickets and interactions than 2014 and 10% quicker. We completed support tickets in 2.1 communications, slightly better than 2014.

History: And how we got here

Since we started using Zendesk in anger (end of 2012), we’ve cleared nearly 7,000 support tickets in 17,000 different client interactions – that equates to 6.4 tickets and 15.5 interactions every day for the last three years. Creating the infrastructure to deal with that volume of support tickets and achieve remarkable results and client satisfaction does not happen by accident. It takes a lot of work, an evolutionary approach, decades of experience and deep soul-searching.

We’ve run a dedicated support infrastructure since 1999. Just a few years after we founded we realised that being a digital agency was worthless if you didn’t provide world-class support. And if you provide exceptional support then clients are happy so stay with you for longer, spend more and are easier and nicer to work alongside. Excellent client support is not only satisfying but also very profitable.

To cope with the increasing demand and complexity of clients’ needs, in the summer of 2013 we created a dedicated WordPress Support team and dissolved our old-fashioned managed-department approach. We had rationalised that our folks were bright and responsible enough that there was little value in a middle management operations layer – at the same time we introduced on-demand support that rewarded staffers if they picked up and solved support issues out of traditional working hours.

These changes had three immediate and dramatic: 1. the response time for support dropped from 22hrs to 16hrs (27% improvement) and 2. client satisfaction increased and 3. the cost per ticket of providing world-class support decreased by 55%. This was win-win-win!

We closed 2013 having solved 1,429 tickets in an average of 16hrs with 5,100 client interactions; that’s an average of 3.5 interactions per ticket. After some research, we felt the use of a middle management / supervisory role in support had added to the number of (pointless?) client interactions and for 2014 we decided to use Zendesk to audit independently client interactions and drive towards solving client tickets faster and with less to-and-fro.

2014 was our first full year of being independently verified by Zendesk, and measured against organisations around the globe. And boy did that make a difference, we solved 2272 support tickets in an average of 12hrs per ticket. Support technicians had 5010 interactions with our clients and scored a very impressive 98.9% satisfaction score. We were completing support tickets in 2.2 interactions and had, in fact, solved over 50% more tickets with fewer support interactions than the previous year.

This put us in the top 10% of all audited support teams in the world and do remember that usually only the very best support teams elect to be audited, of course – it’s very satisfying being the best of the best.

2016?

We’re growing the support team again, adding two more into the head count and we expect to deal with over 4,000 support tickets across the year. We’re striving to improve how we communicate, specifically around micro-projects. We’d love to be able to beat 99.5% client satisfaction, but at the same time, we know the final few decimal places are super hard to achieve.

We’ll maintain our “maximum number of supported clients” at 35 to ensure we continue to offer a world-class service to a carefully curated client list. We know we can do better, but I’ll leave you with a quote from a client.

“You guys rock support, you really are the best support company I’ve ever come across.”