Everyday Life of Customer Support

Message # 1 | 9:30 AM 2014-05-06

We have released a lot of updates recently. We are constantly adding new features, update the existing, redesign our projects, improve everything we can smile

And today we would like to tell you about the Company's department that works with our customer most closely. That's right, I mean Customer Support. I would like to tell you about some innovations of the support service, and the most important of them is the transfer to the single ticket processing system - OTRS.

OTRS, an initialism for Open-source Ticket Request System, is a free and open-source trouble ticket system software package that a company, organization, or other entity can use to assign tickets to incoming queries and track further communications about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRS

The reason why the system was integrated is simple - uCoz is being actively developed and the number of tickets is constantly increasing as well. At some point the previously implemented tools and methods were no longer enough, and we needed a new solution that would allow us to merge the entire flow of tickets in a single point. And OTRS solves this task successfully. The system has a number of other undeniable advantages:

an employee is not bound to his/her workplace - all work is done through a web interface;
tickets can be divided into queues by types and subjects;
the possibility to assign priority to a ticket both manually and automatically;
re-assigning of a ticket from one specialist to another in just one click;
grouping of all correspondence with a user into one ticket that contains all messages, statuses, notes etc.;
unique ID of each ticket;
the possibility to use pre-written answers to typical questions;
monitoring of tickets and a flexible system of reports;
automatic archiving and storage of tickets with the possibility to quickly access them.

Of course, the out-of-the-box version of this software did not suit our tasks and needs completely, so it was customized. This is an ongoing process: we are constantly improving the system in order to process and answer the tickets faster, increase the quality of answers. After all ticket streams had been brought to a single interface, the average response time reduced.

And here are some statistics data about our Customer Support:

16 employees from 5 cities in 2 countries;
24/7 work;
47 queues;
more than 330 thousand tickets, submitted by users;
more than 1 000 000 messages, written by Customer Support.

Distribution of tickets by types can be represented by the following chart:

As you can see, a considerable part of tickets is abuse reports and messages sent via the Contact Us form, as well as various notifications about problems with user websites and domains, reports about malware and illegal content. On the basis of such notifications the support specialists make decisions about blocking of infringing websites or notifying the website administrators.

As it was mentioned above, we are constantly improving our Customer Support, and we are not going to stop. I'm sure that the tools we integrate, as well as your feedback, will help us make our work even more effective and quality.

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