Cutting Response Time in Half while Increasing our Support Ticket Volume
Keeping our customers happy is a source of pride at PagerDuty. While having a reliable product that is loved by our customers makes our lives easier, people still run into the occasional issue. We’ve implemented some unique tools and processes to ensure our customers receive the support they deserve.
Keeping Response Time at a Minimum
For the past year, our goal was to initially respond to customers within two hours. While this is easy in principle to do, keeping an eye on such a metric in real time isn’t as easy as you would hope. Earlier this year, we developed a dashboard that shows our queue of open tickets with color-codes to visually indicate how long a ticket has been idle.
As each new ticket inches towards our two-hour window it transitions from green to red. This makes it easy to see at a glance which customers we’re behind in responding to.
Our dashboard also makes it easy to see if any of our agents have too many tickets on their plate, helping us balance our queue and spread the work evenly. We’ve already seen a drastic effect on our customer wait times:
This is all while our ticket volumes have increased steadily:
Alerts for Missing our Internal SLA
Occasionally, a ticket will go untouched for more than two hours. If and when this happens, we trigger a PagerDuty incident that alerts the agent responsible for the ticket. If the alert is not acknowledged or resolved, it will get escalated to another agent on the team.
Our team has a designated room in HipChat to discuss support issues. Using PagerDuty’s HipChat integration the entire team can start chatting to tackle a latent customer issue.
Keeping Our Customers 100% Satisfied
The combination of all of these tools helps us hit our goal of 100% customer satisfaction. This is a goal is at the forefront of all of our agents’ minds and something that we narrowly miss each month. Our lowest monthly rating over the past 12 months was 96%, and we hit 100% in both October and December. We utilize Zendesk’s automated customer satisfaction emails to capture this information.
We track these metrics in GoodData, which are automatically synched with Zendesk, making it really easy to build dashboards with useful information.
We try to be as open as possible with the rest of the PagerDuty teams, so we display what our customers are saying about us (even bad things) on a television that displays recent customer satisfaction ratings:
This dashboard was made during a recent hack day. Source is available here: https://github.com/ryanhoskin/satisfaction
But this is just the tip of the iceberg; we use a variety of tools to help manage interactions with our customers.
- Zendesk for managing tickets and our knowledge base
- Olark for live chat, configured to create tickets within Zendesk
- JIRA for communication between teams and filing bugs
- HipChat for JIRA and PagerDuty updates
- Skitch for screenshots.
Our team is here to help our customers. So please don’t hesitate reaching out with any questions or support you need to use PagerDuty. If needed, the best way to connect with us is via support@pagerduty.com and we’ll see your name pop right up on our dashboard.