Just like our own customers, we take customer support very seriously. We live and breathe good customer service, and are fanatic about continually improving.
We have frequently surveyed groups of customers, asked for feedback and performed internal peer reviews.
Earlier this year, we started to ask every customer who raised any support issue (regardless of how big or small) to rate how they thought their case was handled.
The customer is, after all, the best and most sharp-eyed judge of customer support quality.
We have decided to share the results collected with you. It is important for our customers to see where their investment is going, and we also feel that being transparent about this kind of stuff will pay dividends when it comes to building trust and a good business relationship.
Our support team
Although all of us (including sales agent) give a hand in customer support, our support team is composed of three groups:
- Support agents – our first level support agents tend to handle questions or issues relating to using Kayako software
- Service engineers – our second level support agents tend to deal with more complex product related issues, typically relating to implementing Kayako software in an in-house environment
- Developers – the third level of support who quickly handle any product defects that are reported or identified during the course of case diagnosis
Notable numbers from the surveys
Here is a rundown of some of the notable numbers (monthly averages):
- 95% of customers are satisfied with our customer support in on a whole.
- 96% of customers are satisfied with our response speeds and issue resolution times.
- 96% of customers are satisfied with the quality and clarity of our technical explanations.
- 98% of customers are satisfied with the quality of our e-mail based communication.
“Lies, damned lies and statistics”
Although you’ll already be taking these figures with a pinch of salt, we stress that they have not been manipulated or altered in any way. Every completed technical support case receives a survey, and every single response has been counted here.
Some graphs
For each measure, we asked customers to score us out of five, with a five being the best and one being the worst. The December results have been taken up to the 9th.
Month on month, we are shrinking the number of cases where a customer has been unhappy with a certain aspect of our support (it is still early in December, but we are confident about another marked improvement).
In late September, we introduced a peer review system where teams would regularly meet to discuss the good points and bad points of poorly rated cases. The review focused on our technical explanations and communication – making sure that we don’t jargonify things too much and keeping things crystal clear. Improvements following this are reflected in the graphs above.
We are very pleased with the feedback from our customers, but we won’t be happy until almost every case receives a score 5.
What we do when a customer is unhappy
Every survey response is sent to the inbox of every manager and team leader, including the CEO. When any case receives a rating of three or lower, we all jump on it.
The team leaders responsible for the department reviews and reports on the case – usually within a couple of hours of the survey coming in. The initial report is sent to the CEO and managers.
We look at the customer’s specific complaints and assess whether or not the case was satisfactorily resolved for the customer, and any mistakes or possible failings are identified. We then get in touch with that customer to put things right.
After contacting the customer, we conduct a more thorough review of the case and talk it over with the whole team in the daily meeting.
A very tiny number of problems go unnoticed by the time the customer is asked to complete a satisfaction survey, and rarely does something slip by. Should we miss something, the measures we have in place allow us to ‘clean up’ as quickly as possible.
By no later than the day following receipt of a bad survey response, all of our team are clued up as to why the problem occurred and how to avoid the problem in future.
We are happy to report that almost all of the customers who bring problems to our attention using the satisfaction survey end up being happy customers.
A few recent comments from customers
Customers are invited to leave any short suggestions as part of their survey response. We couldn’t resist sharing a few of them!
Your support has improved tremendously. I have used Kayako for the last 2 1/2 years and I have watched the support at Kayako really turn around from where they started.
Your service is perfect, nothing to change.
Well, so far you are doing great. you call, you reply to the emails as fast as you can, I AM IMPRESSED!!!
The service is really great. All staff are patient and do their utmost to help solving the problem!
The initial experience has been excellent and fully supported my ability to change the trail in to a purchased licence (which will happen shortly).
So far I am impressed and pleased. (As someone who ran a 22-person helpdesk for 9+ years for a small local ISP – I do sorta know a bit about this… and you guys are way good.)
Excellent support and obviously using your own tools.
Everything was excellent. I see no specific areas requiring improvement.
So far, so good. We are very pleased with your product.
Since I got in contact with Kayako I was always pleased with the support I received.
I find Kayako support to be quite satisfactory. When I reported a couple of security related bugs the response was almost instantaneous, however another critical issue that was isolated to our deployment took a bit longer to deal with. Seeing as Kayako support is based somewhere in India and North American customers run into problems generally during the evening or late at night (India time) it would be good if you could beef up your night shift a bit and ensure that someone is always available to take live support sessions. That is my only “complaint”
(We have acted on this feedback, and will be extending our shift ours. We currently only miss a couple of working hours for each major time zone in North America. Support is provided almost 20 hours a day throughout the week.).
Not yet a customer, but presenting your product to my executives this afternoon, so might be soon with any luck. I thank you for the valuable assistance you have lent while I configured the trial system for a demonstration.
Not a suggestion but you guys were great with support!
No improvement required. Excellent customer support and product. Keep up the fantastic work!!!!
I feel you do an excellent job – I’m quite a supporter of Kayako.
Excellent service all around. Great job to the team. Dinker Sangar is also extremely helpful.
Always be there for me as you have in the past. I love your service and am happy for this experience.
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Like any other company, we are happy to talk up our customer support. From now on, we will take that a step further and publish the results of our exhaustive surveying and will keep you updated on our progress and path to perfection.
If you have any questions or would like to leave your own feedback, please leave a comment.
Thanks for reading!