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Taking JomSocial Support to The Next Level

JomSocial Support

A big concern since iJoomla took over the JomSocial project has been customer service. The vast majority of our customers are very happy but when issues have arisen, some customers haven’t always received the quality of service we want to provide.

We receive more than 700 support requests every month. To efficiently handle a workload that big takes really good software and a well-trained team of professionals.

Paul Smith, Support ManagerLuckily, we had the good fortune to hire one of our own customers as our new support manager. Paul Smith has been instrumental in revolutionizing our support system.

What was wrong with our support?

We had both technical issues and problems with service quality.

Technical Issues

Our support forum is powered by Kunena which was designed as a community forum. It’s not a proper support ticketing system and was missing a number of key features that we needed.

As a result, we couldn’t see all of the tickets that were posted and some of the tickets were deleted automatically before being resolved (because of a mysterious bug). Tickets didn’t have a clear status, they couldn’t be assigned to a specific team member and they were sometimes "hijacked" by customers which made everything harder to track.

In short, it was a mess and it needed sorting out.

For the last five months, I’ve been working with Paul and with our developer Silviu to completely modify Kunena.

Customers can now:

  • Add and change a visible status for each ticket.
  • Tell us their level of knowledge.
  • Escalate a ticket up to the support manager.
  • Post site information on a secured page.
  • Re-use site information previously entered.
  • Use the forum on their mobile device (responsive design).
  • Easily access a list of confirmed bugs.
  • Easily access a list of all the fixed bugs, where each bug has a hot fix attached.

Moderators can:

  • Filter tickets based on status, category, moderator, etc.
  • Mark tickets as bugs so that we can track their resolution.
  • Assign tickets to other moderators.

And from now on, only moderators and the original poster of the ticket can reply to that ticket. So no more hijacking = Much more efficient support.

These changes have made a huge difference. We can now see clearly what is going on, who needs help and the status of remaining tickets.

Every ticket has a clear status

Support Training

Paul isn’t just good with the technical aspects of customer support. He also has over 20 years of experience working with customers and he’s started training our support team to give world-class support.

Weekly Meetings

Our support team now has a weekly meeting in which they discuss different cases, how they were handled and how they could have been handled in a better or more efficient way. They also discuss best practices in different scenarios and new policies. Each week, our support team gets better and better.

Tiered Approach

Previously all members of the support team would handle all the support requests. Now each team member handles the topics about which they know the most. If they get stuck, they can assign the ticket to a more knowledgeable team member, usually a developer. This saves a lot of time.

Escalation

Occasionally, a customer would get frustrated, usually as a result of more than one thing going wrong. Now if a customer feels that they are not getting the help they need, they can turn directly to the support manager. This usually leads to a swift resolution.

Bug Tracking

Our new system allows us to mark tickets as bugs and track them to ensure full resolution. Each bug has a corresponding ticket on our Trello board, where we handle the entire JomSocial project. Once the bug is fixed, customer support can tell the customer how to solve the problem.

This method has been so effective that when we released version 3.2, there were NO known bugs at all. This never happened before at JomSocial.

Tracking bugs on our Trello Board

Reducing Support Time

We feel we’ve made some pretty big strides in improving customer support, but we’re not done yet. We still have a number of goals we want to reach.

  1. Reduce the amount of time our customers have to wait for support. Now that we can see clearly who hasn’t received help, this has already improved dramatically. But we still want to cut the wait.
  2. Faster resolutions. We want to give our customers the resolution they need with just one reply — or three at the most. This is a part of our ongoing support training.
  3. 100% Satisfaction. Our ultimate goal is reach 100% customer satisfaction not just with our product, but also with our support.

This year, our development team has been focused on the next generation of JomSocial. You can see the results in JomSocial 3.2 — and 3.3 will be even better! But the product is nothing if the support isn’t great too, so we’ve been putting a huge amount of effort into support quality and process.

We’ve already received great feedback about our changes to the support system,. If you find yourself using it, do let me know how you get on.

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