What happened? What problem did we solve?

Once again, a developer nervously told a support engineer that the issue the customer is experiencing is not on our side. He added that it was at least the 4th time that he was answering this particular question and that it would be worth remembering it. The support manager got offended and replied that he was not sure if the situation was the same, since he did not have their chat history at hand and the question was urgent and required immediate attention. The customer, seeing his request status is not changing, continues to bombard the support team with questions. 

Everyone suffered in this context. First of all, the support person, literally torn between chats. The developer suffered from the same repetitive questions, the management suffered from complaints, threats, and eternal emergency mode. The customers suffered, as their questions were left hanging in the air. The situation is quite typical for software providers, where minor bugs, appearing here and there, make everybody nervous, both just because they exist but also because developers are bothered with the same question: well? when?

Messaging apps are evil

“The root of the problem leading up to this situation was the way requests were handled by the support team” says Project manager UpTrader Elena Pinchuk. 

 “When the company was a small startup, each customer was assigned a personal manager who answered all their questions in a convenient messaging app: Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, and so on. Maximum ease of communication, instant response. However, when the company started growing, the number of chats increased, and the answers to typical questions got lost in tons of correspondence. Gradually, chaos ensued and the system began disintegrating. Change was triggered when a manager approached the developers with yet another “stupid” question but they decided that the problem was not worth their attention and left work for the weekend. It turned out that the problem was serious, but due to the lack of alerts and status updates they were unable to correctly identify its severity. The team repeatedly apologized to the customer, drew conclusions, and decided that it was time to give up messaging apps and launch a support portal.”

What system we chose

After having researched the market, we decided to try the Help Desk by Atlassian since we already used their task tracker Jira. “We decided to try the system for a month, configuring it so that certain incidents trigger alerts”, continues Elena.

“Within a week, we trained and tested our support team and informed our customers that they could now use this new and convenient system. As expected, some customers were unhappy with the change, because they had to get used to another system. Some had unfounded fears that now it would be even slower and worse”.

 After all, before they could just type a quick message and now they had to go to the portal, think how to categorize their issues, leave a ticket, and wait. Every customer has an account. To create a ticket, they have to answer 3-4 questions and specify the urgency and the category: bug, new feature request, etc. The ticket instantly goes into the system. The customer can see how the status of their issue updates from open to in progress and is reassured that their issue is being addressed. It is convenient for both the developers and the support staff that categorization makes it possible to systematically track recurring errors and optimize solutions accordingly. A convenient search function allows the customer to find their issue history in two clicks.

What was the result? 

“We limited the ticket resolution time to 48 hours, with 6 hours to first response for non-urgent questions and 1.5 hours for urgent ones. This added predictability and transparency. The speed with which we are working has increased and the number of support tickets has decreased. We don’t feel the need to monitor all the chats anymore and manually go through urgent and non-urgent tasks. A pleasant bonus is the ability to track employee efficiency”, said Elena. 

“So far, the system is not ideal”, added CEO UpTrader Vasily Alexeev. 

“However, we can already see a significant effect. Satisfied employees, customers, and managers are the key to customer loyalty and sustainable development of the company”.