What’s the Developer’s Blog?
Last month, I reached out to you, our Community members, for your help to be testers of our new support enhancements. Once again, I’d like to extend a big THANK YOU to those who rose to the call and dedicated your precious time to help us make support better. Your candid and honest feedback really opened our eyes and helped to take the project to the next level. The team and I were overwhelmed by the number of eager volunteers we had and regretted that we didn’t have the chance to talk with everyone who expressed interest.
With that said, we’d love to include the rest of the Community members who weren’t picked for testing to be able to still get an insider’s look into the development of the new support forms as we ramp up for launch. That’s why I’m excited to share more about the development and work behind-the-scenes on our latest support enhancement (which I’ll now refer to as “smartform” as it’s less of a mouthful!) as we approach our anticipated launch date of late August. I’ll be using this Developers Blog as an opportunity to share more about my day-to-day work on this exciting project with you! Think of it almost like an editorial or a DVD commentary, if you will 😉
The journey we’ve been on with support
Did you know? In the early days of Public Mobile, support was done via e-mail. A small subscriber base and far less complicated business demands made personal responses via e-mail a simple yet effective model. Then, as our business changed, we transitioned to Community private messaging as our sole method of reaching out to our Moderator team to better organize our interactions with you, our customers. While this has worked well for us in our early stages, we’re increasingly feeling the pinch on all sides for a better way to do things. We have heard a number of you voice your frustrations with our support model and we especially heard this in April & May of this year when we had some technical issues that regrettably impacted some of your services.
I recently had the chance to do a deep dive with our Moderator Team and observe them in action helping our customers. They’re truly a busy bunch and I assure you it’s not easy being a Mod! One thing I couldn’t help but notice was the sheer volume of messages they handle on a daily basis. When I looked at the types of interactions they were having, a lot of the times they couldn’t action a customer’s request right away because they didn’t have all the information they needed. When you think about it, how many extra messages are caused by:
- The need to authenticate a customer
- Requesting more information about the account
- Requesting more information about the problem
- Clarifying other details
When you consider that these easily create 3-4 responses, and that if each had a gap of a couple of hours in between, that's a lot of time added up! Unfortunately, with today’s open field private messaging, we’re not making things easy for you OR our Moderators.
Which made me think- what if the first message of each ticket was “the perfect first message”? I’m talking about a ticket with all the details laid out for the Moderator in which what needs to be done is clear as crystal. That’s how we landed at the concept of a form to create a ticket - by asking you the right questions to help you tell us your story, we set you up for success by guiding you through the ticket submission process. By aiming for this one and done approach, we hope to improve the timeliness of getting help and giving help in a simple but powerful way.
A teaser of what’s to come (nothing is final yet!)
The journey to improve support is a long one, but this is the first change of many that we will be co-building with you to help improve the support experience here at Public Mobile. We recognize there’s a lot of opportunity here for us to grow, and we plan to involve you in every step of the way.
What’s next?
In our second entry in the Developer’s blog, I’ll share more details about what testing was like, what our customers told us to work on, and what feedback we’ve focused our efforts on to be ready for launch by late August. Let me know what you thought of this little blog entry of mine, or what you’d like me to share in future entries!
Best,
Alan
@mimmo wrote:@pm-smayer97 the have actually removed (or maybe never added) the additional time frame.
I guess pm constantly runs on peak periods. I have to say the reply time statement is very misleading. But who would want to join a company where they say it typically takes 24 to 48 hours, but if we have a slower than average day you might get a reply in 2 hours.
I see they had to change their material again to cover themselves.
But I guess it is peak time most of the time. BTW, the only time I saw PM return close to the 2 hours response time was shortly after the call centre was closed; maybe as a result of redeployed staff? But that is not consistent...
And the current wording STILL sets up false expectations... since they only mention the 2 hours timeframe. WHen delays happen, given THAT context, would expect longer responses, in the several hours maybe but would never expect response times to take DAYS!
So PM is still promoting misleading and false information. So when customers are disgruntled, they are the ONLY ones to blame, not the customers that post on this forum that they are unhappy.
@pm-smayer97 the have actually removed (or maybe never added) the additional time frame.
I guess pm constantly runs on peak periods. I have to say the reply time statement is very misleading. But who would want to join a company where they say it typically takes 24 to 48 hours, but if we have a slower than average day you might get a reply in 2 hours.
