Customer Happiness Report (March 2013)

Written by Ryan Ray on April 2, 2013 News.

March came roaring in like a lion, and well, she did not let up all month. Our excitement started early with the release of  WooCommerce 2.0. A few short days later we introduced Product Finder for WooCommerce. The much anticipated Superstore theme made it’s debut while the U.S. team members met up for WordCamp Atlanta. Finally, we rounded out the month with the announcement that WooThemes is now on ThemeForest.

Customer Happiness in Numbers

Looking at the numbers:

  • 13,257 new tickets created this month.
  • 31,929 ticket touches. (how many times all tickets were opened, tickets with multiple responses, or re-assigned, etc…)
  • 29.10 hours to First Response (the amount of time the average customer waits for our first response).
  • 19% of all tickets are responded to within 8 hours; and
  • 89% satisfaction rating on all tickets.
The Peak of WooCommerce 2.0
The Peak of WooCommerce 2.0

Looking at the chart above you’ll see the first spike there in support requests just after the release of WC 2.0. Almost peaking at 1,000 tickets that day. Even though we put quite a bit of thought and effort into making sure the community was aware of the changes involved in WooCommerce 2.0 release, and how to handle the update, an overwhelming number of tickets followed. Our plan for these types of situations is quite simple. Everyone on the team drops what they are doing and jumps into a support role. We sent out an SOS and the team responded with all hands on deck to make sure all tickets were taken care of!

Diving Deeper

Let’s compare the numbers between our support channels.

Ticket Groups for March
Ticket Groups for March

Support & WooCommerce are our top channels this month, if you can’t see the trend by now. Support had 5,744 tickets increasing by 898. WooCommerce had 4,311 tickets, an increase of 2,001 from last month. Account tickets had even had an increase of 760 to a total of 2,577.

Benchmarking & Context

Benchmarks for March
Benchmarks for March

You can see how much of a support driven company we are with these industry comparisons. The amount of tickets we handle comparatively is pretty staggering! And even though our personal satisfaction rating dipped, we’re still ahead of the industry average. As you see below, there will be tickets we can review to see why our numbers dipped on those three dates and fix the issues that made anyone unhappy.

Ticket Satisfaction for March
Ticket Satisfaction for March

Time For Action

Now that we’re into our third Customer Happiness Report, we’re understanding how to tackle these numbers. With this kind of data we can fix certain metrics that bother us, and in the end have let our customers down. Like mentioned, for this month we were hurt by the WooCommerce 2.0 update. The update was definitely necessary and very helpful for the bright future of WooCommerce, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn things from the update for the future. From this month’s data our goals are as follows:

  • Push hard to bring WooCommerce tickets under control. Meaning the entire support team will answer WooCommerce tickets.
  • Look at the specific issues that people have had updating WooCommerce, themes, extensions, etc… and see if there is any way we can address that in future updates.
  • Continue fixing any account and site issues our users have had. Eliminating those issues should resolve any increase in account or sales tickets. The mothership needs to run flawlessly!

We’ll be repeating this goal until you are sick of it, we must deliver happiness. As always, we appreciate your feedback on our support. Here’s to next month being easier on our support team! There will at least be better weather which makes for more energized and faster ninjas!

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32 Responses

  1. joshmd
    April 2, 2013 at 5:57 pm #

    It’s been 4 days since I submitted my Sensei support ticket and I’m yet to hear back, so I wouldn’t say I’m too happy. I understand it’s been Easter, but some communication would be good.

    • Ryan Ray
      April 2, 2013 at 6:07 pm #

      Hey Josh, sorry for any delay here. Can you let us know a ticket number so we can handle it? Thanks!

      • joshmd
        April 2, 2013 at 6:36 pm #

        33938 Thanks.

  2. Sandie
    April 2, 2013 at 6:23 pm #

    Personally I feel your support has been improving since you switched to Zendesk. I think you’ll always have an issue around a major update or WooCommerce, because it potentially impacts all the extensions, and that’s a heck of a lot of items all requiring support at the same time.

    Could you look at your processes around ‘on hold’ tickets? As an example, Ticket #25907 has been on hold quite a while. Given the WooCommerce update I’ve held off chasing over it, but it’s a pretty ancient ticket now 😉

    • Ryan Ray
      April 2, 2013 at 6:38 pm #

      Hey Sandie, thanks for the comment. Really glad that ZenDesk has helped improve the support you are getting.

      Big releases/updates like that will always inevitably bring increase in support, but there are ways to help minimize and triage the issues people may run into. Things we’ll hopefully put into place for future updates. 😉

      Sorry for the delay on your Sensei tickets, our lead developer had been away welcoming a daughter into the world. Looks like the ticket and issue has been fixed and will be deployed ASAP!

      • Sandie
        April 2, 2013 at 7:07 pm #

        Then apparently congratulations are in order 🙂

  3. John
    April 2, 2013 at 6:49 pm #

    Woo Ninjas, are you reading customers ideas http://ideas.woocommerce.com/forums/72423-general-ideas- ?

    • Ryan Ray
      April 3, 2013 at 5:11 am #

      We most definitely do. Many of our devs respond there to all the ideas that we can. They know of upcoming products and can triage ideas to properly update their statuses.

      Is there a particular one you feel we’re not paying attention to?

      • John
        April 4, 2013 at 8:46 am #

        I just missing your comments in hot ides section 😉

  4. tweedsolutions
    April 2, 2013 at 7:25 pm #

    Excellent results!

  5. joeyrudi
    April 2, 2013 at 11:17 pm #

    Can someone point me to the support policy for extensions? I just had a ticket automatically closed without a shred of help because “…this setup is beyond the scope of our support policy” My setup (and issue) includes WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions, and WooCommerce Groups.

    Ticket: 34055

    Thanks

    • Michael Krapf
      April 3, 2013 at 2:25 am #

      Hey Joey,

      Thanks for providing all the detail within your ticket. I’ve assigned someone to investigate the case 🙂

      • joeyrudi
        April 3, 2013 at 9:58 pm #

        Update:

        For my particular case, I can say that Woo re-examined my ticket and has worked with me. Whew. Thank you Woo.

  6. samantha9
    April 3, 2013 at 2:54 am #

    Hello,
    I’ve been experiencing delays as well, 48-72+ hours, only to see responses with solutions that do not work, beyond scope or not related to my specific question. My request was to use shortcodes, specifically buttons (See More, Buy Now) in the features plugin that is required for the front page of The One Pager and others. My ticket was also closed and merged. Request #33134 (since March 27th)

    If possible, please allow more selections other than Good or Bad for a rating system .. rarely it’s that black and white. I think what’s in the middle is what really counts.

  7. nguyenluyen
    April 3, 2013 at 6:02 am #

    Thanks for share.

  8. dgpromo
    April 3, 2013 at 4:52 pm #

    Ninjas ROXXX ! 😉

  9. Aliput
    April 3, 2013 at 8:21 pm #

    Hi Guys, this is more of a heads up just to say, while I love your products and will continue to use them, the latest version of the wooCommerce plugin seems to have many debug issues. If you turn on debug in wp-config file you will see what I mean. There have been a number of issues I’ve had to get corrected. Thanks Guys.

    • Ryan Ray
      April 3, 2013 at 9:49 pm #

      Reported these on Github for our guys to investigate? 🙂

      https://github.com/woothemes/woocommerce/issues?milestone=15&state=closed

      • Aliput
        April 4, 2013 at 11:54 pm #

        I will. However, I shouldn’t need to. It should be standard practice to check no?

        • Ryan Ray
          April 9, 2013 at 1:22 am #

          I’m sure our devs have debugging on and actively check, but if there any issues you want to submit Github is the place!

  10. Shaun
    April 4, 2013 at 12:22 am #

    I have been in contact with your support team several times as I have been buying and using many different WooCommerce extensions lately and I have some feedback.

    – Responses are taking a very long time. Maybe this is because of the big new release but I’ve noticed it for a while now.

    – Every time I post a bug report, even when I state that it has been tested with latest versions of the plugins and with other plugins disabled, often the first response will be asking me again to make sure I’m using the latest version. All this does is delay the fix because now I have to wait another day or so for your next reply.

    – I have personally found bugs (major, plugin-breaking bugs) in at least 3 of your plugins and I am just 1 man. I’m not sure if your QA is slipping but that seems very bad, especially when the bugs are extremely obvious because it means the plugin does not do what it is supposed to do. It makes me wonder if you actually use your own plugins.

    – As has been said above, the stats you are posting about Consumer Happiness are misleading and not all that useful. Time to first response is a joke because your first response is not useful.

    • Gaslight
      April 8, 2013 at 4:27 pm #

      out of curiosity did you had any issues with the Gravity Forms addon?

    • Ryan Ray
      April 9, 2013 at 1:26 am #

      Shaun,

      1 – We unfortunately do have a backlog of WooCommerce 2.0 related tickets. Most involving out of date themes, extensions, etc… If your ticket is WooCommerce related we’re trying to get through those ASAP!

      2 – This is our fault here, an oversight of reading a ticket too fast or something. 🙁

      3 – We test in as many setups and scenarios as we can, thus no major bugs like you mention should exist. What kind of bugs did you run into to clarify? It is impossible for us to test for every server setup, every WordPress setup, every 3rd party theme, etc…

      4 – Our first responses, even if bad responses, shouldn’t take that long. So in both areas of speed and quality, we will work on improvements.

  11. frano09
    April 4, 2013 at 7:27 am #

    You guys do a great job however my own tickets seem to get picked up a little slower these days but with the big woocommerce v2 that’s nothing to worry about.

    However, i don’t want to ruin the party (because you indeed do a good job with your customer service!) but i do think most people won’t click the ‘Bad, im not satisfied’ button that fast if they are somehow not happy. People who are satisfied though, would hit that ‘happy’ button immediately (just my opinion, don’t know how the majority thinks about this). If i’m right (and i’m alw….), you could ask yourself whats the value of this report? It does however point out that you really do care about your support (and you should, it really is your usp!)

    Since i’m already writing i might address 2 other things (posted them on the idea board):

    – The changelog doesn’t link to the changelog in most of my sites anymore
    – I find myself searching for my tickets, maybe it’ll be a good idea to create a tab ‘my tickets’ on the ‘my account’ page (that’s actually the place i find myself going to when i search my tickets:)). Even if it’s just a redirect.

    You do a great job, keep it up!

    • Ryan Ray
      April 9, 2013 at 1:31 am #

      Thank you for the feedback here. My assumption is almost opposite when talking about the two options for ticket feedback.

      There’s the thought that you’ll always here from anyone who is unsatisfied with your service, but rarely hear all the times you’ve done well (unless you are exceeding expectations by a great deal). That’s my assumption at the least, that we hear more from users who are unsatisfied. And that definitely helps us pinpoint issues with bad ratings, taking their feedback and fixing the issue.

      Concerning changelogs, this needs to be updated in our WooFramework to point them on the right spot. I’m sure it’s on our devs to do list.

      For your tickets, you should be able to find all open issues from our support portal. There is definitely a good idea there though to make this easily found from the account dashboard, thanks! 🙂

  12. cmwwebfx
    April 6, 2013 at 2:25 pm #

    For the love of God… please make me happier. I feel like I have been completely lost and forgotten in the depths of Woo. Possibly pushed under a carpet unintentionally.

    Excerpt taken from past comments as my ticket I think has been trashed in the previous help desk.

    Multiple times I have made contact, and still waiting on this to be fixed. This was moved to the issue trak, on to git, and still nothing done about it. (I just checked Git and it seems to have been removed by someone)

    When a client adds options created with product addons, the price is not dynamically updated on the product viewed price like what happens with variations. This was addressed as a problem by Woo Staff, and nothing to this day is it fixed.

    I will continue to bring this up in each update as I spend my time reading through the changelogs for a year already in hope and anticipation I will find that it is finally important enough to have been included.

    Please guys, simply fix the plugin so I can continue with my high praises of WooCommerce (not that I would stop my praising of the solution anyway).

    Thanks

    Ciaran

  13. Gaslight
    April 8, 2013 at 4:25 pm #

    My ticket #36564 has been submitted three days ago, still no one assigned
    the issue concerns a purchased addon
    can you please check? I have a developer working on this and costs me money if I have delays

    thank you

    • Ryan Ray
      April 9, 2013 at 1:39 am #

      Hi there,

      I’m checking on this ticket now and moving it along appropriately!

  14. mook73
    April 9, 2013 at 4:52 am #

    get your links right. found several broken links and way is the contact form not working?

  15. netaesthetics
    April 17, 2013 at 8:26 am #

    What is with all the broken links on this website? It doesn’t inspire confidence, especially considering you are web developers.

  16. bigfrank
    April 17, 2013 at 9:31 pm #

    I was a little upset about not getting a responce to my situation. However, after reading all the problems that is encountered on a daily basis I will settle down and wait.

  17. robwfounder
    April 23, 2013 at 9:18 pm #

    Your happiness stats are a joke. There is no way with the backlog of tickets, the generic first answer every time of “Are you using the most current version…” and the attitude that it is our job as paying customers to find and report bugs, that 89% are happy.

    NOT A CHANCE.

    You guys are just not getting it…you can’t leave customers hanging. We use your products to run our businesses..and can’t wait for days on end with little or no response or help.

    It would be one thing if you were selling some little toy apps, but your lack of service is affecting OUR livelihoods.

    Stop racing to keep releasing new stuff and make sure your current stuff WORKS.

    I have 2 tickets that are still waiting a response two days later.

    Terrible.

    (…And to be clear, the vast majority of unhappy people never take the time to voice their displeasure…they just stop buying and find a better vendor…keep that in mind as you pat yourselves on the back!)