#315: Support Success

Over the last year, almost every metric that you want to go up has gone up at CodePen. More users creating and doing more things. You’d think that customer support would go up at the same level. And if it did, we would have thought that was very normal and dealt with it. But customer support doesn’t have to be this static thing that just is the way it is forever. If you find that people have the same questions over and over, you can fix your app or documentation such to answer that question better. If people report bugs, you can fix them. In fact, if you do a lot of those things, you can reduce customer support even as the number of customers you support grows. That’s exactly what we did at CodePen.

The result is that our customer support went from a job nearly impossible to get all done in a day, or the point where it is a part-time endeavor for whoever is on support that day. Even while our time-to-respond to tickets has also dramatically dropped. We’re just over one hour right now, and of course hope to drop below that line. The truth is though, most tickets are half that, it’s just some tickets that slip between the cracks and take days that hurt our average.

Timejumps

  • 00:23 Support levels in 2021
  • 02:52 What’s changed
  • 06:13 …while still getting new users!
  • 11:11 Sponsor: Netlify
  • 12:15 Average response time to tickets
  • 15:12 Measuring the right thing is difficult
  • 20:32 COVID isn’t the main thing
  • 28:26 Focused on support tickets

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