A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing - The Worst Ticket is Currently Hiding in Your Flock.

In the world of support, trust is everything. It's vital to follow through on every promise and deliver on every commitment. At Foqal, we take this responsibility very seriously. However even with our best efforts, on occasion, things do still fall through the cracks. In one such event this almost led to churn. This is a story about a ticket that lost the account, what we learned from it, and what are the features we released to make sure our customers don’t run into the same problems again.

This started like a regular ticket. A customer was asking for a feature that luckily we were already working on. We were happy to tell the customer this is something they will eventually get, however the timeline still seemed uncertain. Over the next few months, the customer kept asking for an update, and we were still working on it. Then the ticket came in - the same customer had found an issue mostly due to a misconfiguration and a bug on our side. The only difference, the ticket was reported by someone we never met before. We responded with a workaround, added the bug fix to our backlog, and went on our way. However, one thing we didn’t do - we didn’t follow up to see if this workaround actually solved the issue. A few weeks later we hear the bombshell - this unknown reporter was the new head of support and the issue we thought was fixed, was actually not. Now here is the perspective from this newly hired head of support - they start at a company to a system they haven’t used before, its missing a feature that they want but has been unfinished for a few months, and they run into a problem that never gets resolved. So what does the head of support do - quickly make the executive decision to move away from Foqal to the ticketing system they used in the past.

So what did we learn?

1. Don’t skip anything and always follow up. By assuming that the issue was solved - we never understood if the customer was still experiencing problems.
2. Make sure you understand who you are speaking. Not knowing that this is the new head of support played an important role. Instead of assuming this is yet another support agent on the customer side, try to understand what the role of the requester is and try to tailor the answer to their needs. When leadership changes occur in an organization, they are often followed in other changes. Make sure you understand this change before it affects you.
3. If you are setting expectations, deliver on your promises and make sure to set expectation on timeline and ETA accurately. If the timeline drifts, ensure you keep the customer updated about any changes in the ETA. Make sure the customer knows when something will be delivered without having to ask.

What did we do to improve?

1. We enabled SLAs for each of our customers. Foqal Agent SLA configurations allow you to configure SLA Tiers for different severities, across 3 SLA measurements -  Time to First Response, Time to Next Response, and Time to Update. We enabled different SLA settings on each of our customers channels depending on their tier and started running reports. Today, we can proudly say that our average SLA adherence is 97%.
2. Snooze feature - In our case, if we followed up a few days later, we would have known that the customer issue was still not resolved. So we built a snooze feature. This allows you to hide a ticket for a few hours, days, weeks, or even years and reminds you to take an action later on. With the snooze feature, you can respond to the customer, snooze the conversation for a few days, then remember to follow up later.
3. We build an integration with our ticketing system - We use Github internally. We found that sometimes we were dropping feature requests or bugs because they were never making it to our ticketing system. So with our Github integration, whenever a customer reports a bug or files a feature request we can click a button and it goes into our ticketing system.
4. To help our customers understand who we are speaking with, we build more connectors with CRMs. This allows us and our customers to see relevant contact information, view email, Linkedin, Twitter, and understand more about the company. This contact and company data allows our customers to quickly understand who they are speaking with and tailor the conversation for them.
5. To help your customers understand when something you promised will be delivered on, we build a customer dashboard. It allows customers to log in, see any Foqal tickets they created, and ask for clarity directly from the customer portal.

What do we recommend?

1. Ensure you have Foqal Agent in each of your customer channels. This ensures you never drop a single message from the customer.
2. Enable SLAs - make sure that you are not only responding to customers, but doing it quickly. This does not have to be minutes, but it should be at most 8 hours.
3. Run reports - run reports on SLA adherence and set goals and expectations for your team to hit higher SLA adherence.
4. Set expectations and deliver - if you make a promise to your customer, make sure you deliver on it. How customers perceive your brand is often how much they trust and appreciate their support experience.

Conclusion

Ultimately it wasn’t a total bust - the customer converted from using the Foqal application to one of our integrations and is a customer today. Luckily we were able to salvage the relationship and help the customer. However this definitely made us reevaluate how we work with new users, how we follow up, how we ensure that issues have been solved, and how we track and implement feature requests.

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