Great progress in July
We've made great progress in July, despite generally July being the slowest month of the year for businesses in general, for us it's a busy month!
New services were released, PDS series dedicated servers starting at 19.95€ a month, and dedicated managed seedboxes based on those servers, and they proved to be a great success.
Most importantly, support response times has been good in July, reaching levels of last summer.
First response average time was close to best times ever, as was median time. Closure time was also one of the best ever. Last summer we were slightly faster, but back then we were also A LOT smaller company, we have grown since August, 2010 by 520%! Yet we've able to keep support times close to the same as back then, which is very staggeringly good. Last month we received 715 tickets and made 878 replies, so most of the time ticket is immediately solved, with a tickets to replies ratio of 1:1.23. Some tickets do take 10+ replies, but they are usually VERY rare questions in nature, presales and customized requests etc.
We expect to get even faster at ticketing as we grow, the 23 tickets per day average does not justify yet a full time support personnel. At level of 400+ tickets per day we can have true 24/7 support staff in 3 shifts. That will leave about 3 minutes per ticket, for efficient work time of 6.5hours out of 8hour shift. At level of 90 tickets per day there already has to be one full time person handling support. Preferrably at just 60 tickets, leaving 6minutes per ticket average. Currently there is 2 of us handling tickets every day, couple hours each.
We've also made great strides in enhancing quality of service to lower need for ticketing, we are receiving now under half the tickets per active service average than we were getting a year ago! Still there is a lot to work on, we are still far from our goal of 0.08 tickets per active service per month. That is an immensively hard goal to achieve, and will require immensive amounts of R&D, especially when support is easier and easier to reach.
Many big companies achieve way lower ratio than that, but they do it by making ability to reach support as hard as possible, you might wander their site for an hour to find a contact form, which is simply to realize it returns an automated message suggesting KB articles, and tiny print to reach an actual person. But not us! We want to make support as easy to reach as possible, and work on quality of service to lower the need for support to the point we achieve very good ratio.
Making support easy to know keeps us on top of things, knowing if there is usability, stability or performance issues as fast as possible, from the user's perspective, which allows us to make better judgements of what is the most important tasks for development.
If you didn't already know, we also offer an Service Level Agreement (SLA) for our seedboxes! No one else does this for seedboxes, but we do!
Mandag, August 1, 2011
