WordPress Support Report : April 2017

Peerless WordPress Support.

100% Client Satisfaction, 14hr Response, and 205 WordPress Tickets.

April, although a little on the quiet side, runs as smooth as it is possible.

The combination of a shorter working month, and public holidays saw support activity dip by about 15% in April compared to the previous month – this was our quietest month so far in 2017, which so far has seen 1,051 tickets, 2,531 support interactions, and 100% client satisfaction. The average response time this year is 17 hours and 1 minute.

There really is not a lot more to say in a month that went like clockwork: no major outages, no panics, zero emergencies and not a “time-squeeze” in sight. It’s truly lovely, and rare, to work in an unstressed support environment, it gives us all the time and space to really spend quality time fixing client issues. Totally unhurried.

It may seem an excessive luxury to have a team of 5 on call to deal with only 200 WordPress support tickets, especially as some of those tickets take less than 30 minutes to respond to, fix and report back. But, we believe WordPress deserves the best support and that’s what we strive to provide, our aim is quality, not quantity.

We are now a third of the way through the year, and we’re predicted to complete around 3,000 WordPress tickets in about 7,500 support interactions. And we’re striving to maintain 100% client satisfaction for the rest of 2017. Support revenue and profit are up 15% and 22% respectively on this period in 2016, making support operations the second most profitable division after the larger marketing services division.

We continue to refine support operations, tidying-up communications automating some of the pointless tickets. Our aim is great service, not lots of to-and-froing with support tickets. Reducing clutter through AI and automation has been a primary goal over the last year so time and resource is focussed on fixing real issues.

The net effect is that we’ve been able to reduce the absolute number of tickets manually processed, yet spend more time on those tickets to ensure they are fixed right first time. Although difficult to see in the graph below, it shows a general reduction in the number of support tickets, on a backdrop of an increasing support demand from clients.