Customer Council #2: Your feedback

As part of our desire for constant improvement, we recently founded a “Customer Council”. Any customer can be on the council and in return for completing a short monthly survey, they receive a £5/hour discount on our support services. If you’d like to join the council, fill in this form: https://zcmp.eu/qR2b

22 customers completed the survey. The customers represented a broad mix of small and household name brands, white-label agency customers, hosting only and heavy support users.

Summary of what you said:

Current feeling of being a Dorset Tech customer

We use the “NPS” method of measuring customer satisfaction. Anyone that answers less than 6/10 is a “Detractor”, 7-8/10 is passive and 9-10 is a promoter. That yellow zone means that on the whole you’re very neutral about us – 7-8/10 kind of score.

In general this is a “good” NPS score, but we’re not happy with it at all and will be working on it in coming months.

Which team members have you had a positive experience with?

This was really interesting for me. In the “old days” when we were Honest Tech Group, I was the only person you would speak to and I felt like I gave a good service, but there was times when I felt I was letting you down as I’d be on the road or in a meeting for most the day. These days, all of our team are directly accessible via our appointment form or the ticket system. We do often have jokes about when a team member sends an email to a customer the reply often says “Thanks Chris” – hence the reason for this question. As a direct result of this survey, we’ve changed our support platform signatures to not only say the name much clearer of the person you are dealing with, but to also show their picture.

Based on your comments, we’ve made some changes to our support team in the last month. Have you noticed any changes to our communication?

While we’ve not yet finished our improvements, we feel some new processes have really helped. For October; Our first response time average was 1 hours, 4 minutes. This is a tiny bit slower than I’d like, but over 13 hours faster than the industry average and an hour quicker than September. Our average resolution time was 13 hours and 28 minutes, so we’re pretty pleased with that. That’s a 3 hour improvement. This figure is always exaggerated too as some customers like to send in a ticket that should really be 10 tickets. We won’t take any actions from this question this month as we need to see how things progress.

We’ve hired a dedicated cyber security specialist developer. He’ll be running through sites and making various free changes. We’re looking at offering a more proactive “penetration testing” service where he assess how secure your specific site is. Is this the kind of service you would be interested in?

OK so this was very interesting! Taking this feedback, we’re worked up some packages and will announce them in November.

Would you potentially be interested in some kind of “VIP” status that gave you 24/7 support and unlimited wordpress fixes?

We literally have the lowest rates around at 1/3 of the industry average, but we’re very conscious that we have a very diverse customer base.

So some customers think we’re too high priced, some think we’re too low. I think this is pretty typical. Even having the lowest rates around, some will think they’re too high. We’ve looked at this in great detail, but it’s not sustainable for us to lower rates unless customers pay upfront. We constantly have 2-3 months worth of overheads owed to us by customers from up to 6 months ago. We think we could reduce rates by forcing up-front payment, but it is extra admin and just doesn’t feel right. For this one, we’re going to leave the rates as they are, but promote our discount schemes more.

What would you feel is a fair price for this kind of service?

Answers:

• Maximum £20/month
• It would depend on what was included in the service
• To be honest I don’t really know but if based on the Dorset Tech pricing structure I am sure it would be affordable
• £10 – I know this is a low amount but for small players like me can’t afford higher charges, just my view
• Would be good to have this is something went wrong and needed fixing asap

We’ve taken an action to work on some fix packages. We’re just deciding whether to launch this right now, or to hold off under our 24/7 support option is available.

Comments from you

Positives

• I have used your chat and received a response within a minute. Ticket was raised based on the chat and it was picked up within an hour or so, all sorted very quickly. When I used it last month, nobody was available on the chat even though it said you were online so I can definitely see an improvement. Thank you
• Admin/Accounts functions seem quicker now which is helpful. Andrew M has always been very responsive.
• Have always replied and sorted the queries efficiently.
• Not sure really… I found your service very good before.
• I did feel that the response time was really quick when I couldn’t log into WordPress and as soon as I alerted you to another attack on our website it was actioned to a staff member really quickly.
• I have a very little business and the amount of spam messages I receive by email and on Facebook is unbelievable so I take cyber security very seriously therefore I would consider the offer, but it would depend on the price.

• I had issues with this in July, where customers were trying to create fake accounts. My website wasn’t accepting orders, which then meant I had to pay for the team to fix it. It was an unexpected cost when sales are slow, so this topic is important to try and avoid it.
• A very good idea (Fix package)

Neutral Comments

• Our website has been hacked a lot in the last few years, even with the recent upgrade to the secure server from Hero Host. Note from Chris: Having looked into this it looks like there was some dormant code hiding from the previous attack. We’ve worked with Hero Host to try and find even more malware. Prevention is always better than cure when it comes to malware and that’s really the aim of Hero Host – to stop hackers getting in.

Negatives

• You removed direct contact on the first attempt. Note from Chris: This is referring to us removing un-scheduled inbound calls. We have asked for feedback and explored restoring the service, but it’s a trade-off between our team being able to answer unscheduled calls and actually doing the work. We’re prioritising 24/7 support which is coming in very soon and then will look at phone support options again. In the meantime you can book a call back within an hour on our contact page 
• Emailed twice and still waiting for response Note from Chris: We couldn’t find a record of this one, but will ask for clarification
• With the issues I have had since launching my new site it does feel that I have just 1 person working on the site which when it’s going badly is not good as he is working way too many hours. Note from Chris: This is very fair and I appreciate your feedback. This particular site is very complex and so one Director likes to handle the requests personally. A number of us like to do flexible time, including that team member. While he was resolving the issues into the early hours of the morning, this was very much out of choice as he didn’t want you to have issues longer than necessary. I can assure you that his hours worked was the same as normal, if anything a little lower than normal. In response to this comment we’ve began training 2 other developers on the “quirks” of your particular site and the Director is trying to learn to let go of it 😉

Actions:

• Implemented a new process for the ticket system that is more pro-active in showing you that we’re looking at your ticket
• Made progress on the 24/7 support options
• Added a more detailed appointment booking section to the site (still being improved) that gets you to the best person
• The contact page is being redesigned
• We’re investigating an option of a basic support package
• Trained 2 developers on a specific project
• Created a new KPI report

Thank you council members for your feedback 🙂