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Ticket Reponse Times
serverbear
Member
We've been thinking about a few ways to benchmark this, lets forget the technical details for now.
Let me ask 2 questions:
As a user would ticket response times per host factor into your purchase decision?
Hosts, would you allow avg ticket response time benchmarks to be posted? Avg Response, Response by time of day, Day of week etc.**
Comments
Not following you @Randy, but for example via the WHMCS API you can get the Ticket Creation time & the time of the response. So technically you know the time it took.
Glad, i am moving back to WHMCS
apologies. i understand what you meant now, edited out. (kinda sleepy sorry)
Ticket response time means nothing. Whether your problem was solved is what is important. And even better is to have the problem solved or avoided even before you open a ticket, so you don't need to open a ticket in the first place.
Imagine a reply one minute after you open a ticket:
And then you wait 2 days for "the admin" to eventually do something. How does this help you?
@rds100 Very valid point, I could imagine that if someone knew their response times were being monitored it might attract that sort of behavior.
You could track:
Time to respond
Number of tickets needed to resolve
Avg time to resolve
There is a WHMCS plugin for this.
I prefer very stable providers where I don't need to file support tickets.
I haven't had any problems so far with the ff: prometeus, buyvm, hostigation, allsimple, chicagovps
If I outsource support to some 3rd world country and I can assure you a 2 minute response time 24/7. Now don't know if that will fix your issue in 2 min since those support staff neither have access to our system nor have any idea about what to do (unless well trained but still).
Thats my point. Quality is better than quantity.
We have this on our website but it's only for the last 10 tickets for better accuracy.
Could get very interesting showing # of tickets per paying customer per month.
That would be much better I guess. The less tickets, the more stable maybe? But need to exclude other tickets, such as sales, billing, and other clarifications
True but that would only be accurate for normal customers. We have some abnormal clients that handle tickets very differently than how they are supposed to be which makes things difficult (both to support and to track accurately).
It's hard to judge. A provider with little knowledge and a lot of free time may appear great due to volume of tickets, which could do little to reflect why the tickets are being put in. Have to consider a lot of factors.
We still get A LOT of tickets asking us where our servers are located despite having the answer on almost every location on our website.
->#1.Sir, I kno understand linux. First time vps. How do I install Apache.
->#2.Sir, I kno understand ur language. never managed server but played on my friends ftp. How can I install wordpress?
Carry on. That number increases pretty soon till provider will say
-> Sir, we no longer want your business. Please take your business to our competitor. Thank you.
Yes, there should be accounting for valid tickets only. Which is hard and can only be done manually.
its hard to define, a user opens 3 tickets after his first was not responded in 1 minutes
I tried the hosting business once and you describe my experience fairly well. I quit on the 2nd day.
->#2.Sir, I kno understand ur language. never managed server but played on my friends ftp. How can I install wordpress?
Carry on. That number increases pretty soon till provider will say
-> Sir, we no longer want your business. Please take your business to our competitor. Thank you.
I tried the hosting business once and you describe my experience fairly well. I quit on the 2nd day.
users, dont seem to get what is Self Managed, and they complaint when we dont help them install what they want.
that being said, i guess we all can go beyond our limits and help those "users" to install things
Well let me be a bit honest, even though we are unmanaged provider, but that doesn't mean we will throw you out because of those basic questions. We will try to help our users as much as we an if we have time. I have personally secured and optimized bunch of our users vps. But it is the way you ask and when you ask. We will not do the above for every single users but if you ask, we will direct you to the right source. But sometimes, people starts to get a bit annoying and we end up breaking balls.
I don't think that tickets experience can be expressed only with numbers. Expecially in the low end market.
Most of the providers here are small companies or one man show, and this mean there isn't a level 1 staff wich respond to tickets as monkeys with the main goal to keep sla tickets statistics but without any real help for the user.
Yes, you can get slower response average from us, but often one single response after a few hours solve the problem or is more helpful for you.
This pretty much applies to anything that involved IT and customer service.
Yes. You occasionally have that kind of users. Whenever someone new joins the company, i have a look at him/her and already know how much will have to "run" to keep them satisfied.
After a while, when they get to know the procedures in place, everything settles, but can be a very hard time.
I imagine in "ticketing" it is a similar issue. Once the user got everything in place, will probably stop bothering you. Be it managed or unmanaged.
M
After a while, when they get to know the procedures in place, everything settles, but can be a very hard time.
I imagine in "ticketing" it is a similar issue. Once the user got everything in place, will probably stop bothering you. Be it managed or unmanaged.
M
well, if you do what the customer wanted, i am sure he will stop sending requests ,
if its fully managed, i think its not an issue for them to ask support from their provider.
that is part of business, go beyond your limits and make the customer happy.
Indeed.
M
Until it starts impacting the business.
perfectly true.
M
Well - do any of you think this would become an industry standard? I think only a few people would show these stats anyway.
Transparency is key. I'll look at getting a page setup to display our ticket statistics although it's only relative to us and not a way to measure our service (just our response and queues).
Only skimmed this thread, but what if you did the average time of response and average response rating?