How are you measuring the impact of COVID on your support delivery?

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Justin Nuzum
Justin Nuzum Founding Member | Scholar ✭✭

COVID-19 is impacting businesses in infinite different ways. For those of us concerned with how we can provide a great experience and be there from our customers through continued support delivery, how are you forecasting additional need, or contracting need? Are you making any changes to adjust either way?

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  • Courtney Ellis
    Courtney Ellis Founding Member | Scholar ✭✭
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    Hi Justin,

    Interestingly, the force to move to remote work has seemingly increased our coverage hours. Managers are encouraging their staff to be flexible as many are taking on added responsibilities of caring for family members, home schooling, and combating stress of the unknown. This has lead to more "off hours" coverage of our queues, enabling us to move faster on tickets and expand our coverage hours than the traditional 8a-6p EST.

    Our customer support CSATs have been on the rise since we've adopted this new normal, and customers have appreciated the flexibility as they too are often working non-traditional hours of late.

  • David Perrault
    David Perrault Founding Analyst | Expert ✭✭✭
    edited May 2020
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    Similar to Courtney's experience, we have provided additional flexibility for some team members who need to look after their family or might not have the most adequate setup at home to engage with customers.

    We also straight away crated a specific dashboard to track key metrics we thought might provide us visibility on impact of these unprecedented times. Not just in terms of volume or complexity of issues but also tracking how many customers come to us with WFH or covid-19 specific queries. It helped us understand the type of queries our customers have and provide free training or webinar to broadcast this useful information.

    Finally, we also have stopped enforcing support entitlement. Our goal is to help all our customers even if they might have left us previously. We see this as an opportunity to improve or rebuild the link and relationship with our customer and it is tied to our Customer Success program.

  • ChrisHolm
    ChrisHolm Founding Member | Scholar ✭✭
    edited May 2020
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    For us, it is keeping a constant eye on metrics and predictive analysis with a high focus on Knowledge Management. For example, we created knowledge articles specific to questions on the current pandemic. We created FAQs on those and continually update them as new information comes in. The great thing is many other articles referenced in the FAQs already existed in our knowledge base, which increases customer trust in our self-service capabilities. CSAT and NPS are on the rise, which is good for customers and for our employees because there does seem to be a sense of community. As a side note: we share our CSAT survey comments with analysts and the ones mentioning the pandemic have really had a positive impact on our support analysts because customers are showing their gratitude through their comments. Our CSAT score has definitely increased so that is a good thing to see.