Tracking Customer Support

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

I've seen a number of players who are frustrated at the extended delays with our support team. 

 

First, I want to acknowledge that we did send a cut/paste email to all the players who opened tickets in order to get unbanned. Many of them went to players who had been banned for cheating. Unfortunately some of the unban requests were for different reasons. It can't have felt very good to get a cut/paste email response that didn't even address your ticket.

 

Second, it's clear that my staff was too small. We worked hard to get the new support portal up, but the number of tickets and types of issues far exceeded our capacity. Part of the problem is that my staff are still learning all the tools. They have three different systems they need to switch between in order to look up or correct issues. They are getting faster, but this is taking more time than I thought.

 

Here are the current CS stats right now:

- 1,689 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25.

- 480 of them were players requesting unbans. Since we will be unbanning so many players after the next patch, we are not going to be responding to unban request until after that date. As I said above, if you requested an unban, you should have received an auto respond message.

- 252 of them have been closed.

- 957 are untouched.

 

The vast majority of the current open tickets are players who can't access their accounts after G1 reset their passwords in January. These are time consuming tickets. My team takes a lot of extra precautions to double check many different data points in the account to make sure they don't accidentally allow someone to take someone else's account.

 

Here is what we're going to do to fix this situation:

 

• Selali and his team are putting in extra hours over the weekends and try to bring the ticket count down.
• We have already hired twice as many CS staff to get ahead of this.
• We are looking for ways to optimize the CS training and tools to make our staff more efficient.

 

Until I feel comfortable with our service level, either Selali or I will be posting these same stats every week on Friday evening before the weekend.

 

We invite you to keep track, and hold us accountable. There should be no guess work. Hopefully we'll all watch these numbers go down and improve. I'm going to lock this topic, but feel free to discuss this in other threads. I just want a pinned area that we can add posts to it in order to keep the running tally.

 

Thank you,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hey everyone,

 

It’s Friday night, so I’m going to post the current status of Customer Support. Hopefully many of you are seeing your tickets move along.

 

Here are the current CS stats right now:

- 3,159 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25.

- 626 of them were players requesting unbans. We cleared all of these today - however if your account did not get unbanned, please respond to the first ticket you submitted.

- 5,375 interactions back and forth on tickets.

- 1,346 of them have been closed (this includes the 626 we closed for unban requests)

- 1,087 are untouched.

 

We continue to add staff to this department, and we have more new CS folks starting next week.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

We had a busy week at E3, but I don't think that had a negative effect on Customer Support.

 

Here are the current CS stats right now:

- 4,612 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25

- 2,338 of them have been closed.

- 11,353 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 837 of them are untouched.

 

I'm proud of the team. We received ~1500 new tickets this week, yet we're overall lower than last week's untouched ticket count.

Hopefully players are starting to feel like their tickets are being read and responded to.

 

I do want to give everyone a heads up that our progress may slow down this next week. Selali and Lixil are going to be re-training some staff members based on observations and feedback we have received. There were some issues with individual reps copy/pasting responses without properly reading the tickets. I want to apologize to anyone affected by those issues. We are working to make sure that doesn't happen in the future.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

Here are the current CS stats right now:

-5,580 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
-3,293 of them have been closed.
-14,092 interactions back and forth on tickets.
-1,249 of them are untouched.

 

I'm not going to try and sugar coat these numbers. We slowed down due to staffing changes and training.

We are continuing to hire to meet demand.

We are committed to doing better.

 

Also if you didn't get unbanned, you do not need to open a new ticket. Please just reply to your existing ticket to have it re-opened so you can request a review.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

It's Friday evening again. Here are the current CS stats:

- 6,282 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
- 3,489 of them have been closed.
- 15,388 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 1,542 of them are untouched.

 

We completed our re-training this week, and some of that will continue into next week over the holiday.

We added 3 more members to the team that will be immediately jumping into tickets for players who are unable to access their accounts.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

Busy holiday week for us. Many of the staff were off on the 4th, and nearly everyone had extra work prepping and running the week long event.
We've had more support in-game watching server performance, which takes away from our CS time.

 

However here are the current CS stats this week:

- 7,088 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
- 4,233 of them have been closed.
- 17,886 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 1,592 of them are untouched.

 

Even with the downtime, we still cleared nearly as many tickets as we received. That's a lot more than we cleared last week. 

I hope everyone is having fun in-game this week.

 

Thanks,
Matt

 

Edited: Bad grammar

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,
 
This week had an unusually high volume of tickets +721.
We got a large influx of account recovery requests, which indicates that many old players are still discovering the game again.
We closed less tickets than last week. Some of them required a lot of research. Several tickets took more than 4 hours to resolve.

Overall we've been working the oldest tickets to try and get our general wait time down, but those are also the most complex.
We were able to start splitting tickets up to various internal specialists that have gotten better at handle specific types.
Hopefully that will help.

And we've created several new queues with various priorities. Be sure to correctly identify what kind of issue you're having.

Here are the current CS stats this week:
- 7,809 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
- 4,702 of them have been closed.
- 19,662 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 1,641 of them are untouched.
 
Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

I missed yesterday’s update. Was busy and the day got away from me.

Here are the current CS stats this week:
- 8,590 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
- 5,285 of them have been closed.
- 21,671 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 1,727 of them are untouched.

Lots of new tickets this week. I’ll be looking into why those are going up. 

I’m also going to be looking for more / different stats that I can share which might be more help to players in understanding where they are in the queue.

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

We had a rather unfortunate setback yesterday in CS. The provider that runs our customer service portal was hacked, and ~68K bad support tickets were opened. 
It took the better part of the day to get things sorted out. However, since we don't run this tool in-house, and we can't mass delete the garbage, it means our stats are now forever wonky going forward.

I'm just going to list them here, but I'll likely stop posting these stats and come up with another way to communicate our progress in Customer Support.

Here are the current CS stats this week:
- 77,478 total tickets (est. 8,923 before spam) have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
- 6,046 of them have been closed.
- 92,362 interactions back and forth on tickets (est. 23,807 before spam).
- 1,660 of them are untouched.

The key points are:
- We are capable of closing ~750 tickets a week @ an average of 4 interactions per ticket.
- This week we only saw 333 new tickets, so we were able to catching up a lot.
- It would take 5 more weeks to completely clear all the tickets if we can hold this rate.

Thanks,
Matt
 

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

It's that time again. Apparently my math ended up being wrong last week, as I attempted to unravel the tickets from our support provider being spammed.
Clearly the total tickets was wrong. This is the corrected number as it stands today.

Here are the current CS stats this week:
- 76,560 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
- 6,767 of them have been closed.
- 94,310 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 1,369  of them are untouched.

We had another stellar week in CS. We only got 409 new tickets, and we closed more than 700 old tickets.

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

We have now been tracking support for more than 60 days. Hopefully these updates help give a gauge of where we are at.

Here are the current CS stats this week:
- 77,022 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
- 7,444 of them have been closed.
- 96,266 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 1,356 of them are untouched.

We got 462 new tickets, but we closed 677, which means we continue to make up ground.

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

Here are the current CS stats this week:
- 77,422 total tickets have been created for APB since the new portal went up on 5/25
- 7,821 of them have been closed.
- 97,465 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 1,443 of them are untouched.

I knew were bound to slow down. Many of the remaining tickets are ‘difficult’. But rather than copy/paste responding, we are doing the work to respond after properly researching each issue. I know in several cases our agents spent more than 8 hours on a single ticket. We got 400 new tickets, but we closed 377.

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

The reporting in our Support system only extends 90 days out. So these are going to be changing from here on out..

Here are the current CS stats this week:
- 76,568 total tickets have been created for APB in the last 90 days
- 8,161 of them have been closed.
- 98,443 interactions back and forth on tickets.
- 1,472 of them are untouched.

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

I actually missed this update last week due to travel at PAX, but I think I'm going to stop posting updates. They aren't really that helpful.
This week however, we did upgrade our support portal and added some extra questions when you submit a ticket to help us route the ticket better and respond sooner.
Hopefully that will help us finally catch up and get to a reasonable wait time.

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

I figured I would post an update here. The problem is that our CS system reports only go back 90 days. (Edit: tickets are not subject to this limitation)

We currently have 1,892 tickets open and 1,643 of them are untouched. We're working to bring that down.

We have definitely fallen behind a bit, due to pulling CS staff in to help QA recent builds. I have approved 3 new dedicated CS staff who start next week.

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

It's been a while, so it's a good time to update this thread with new stats.

I mentioned back at the end of September that we were in the process of hiring 3 new CS staff.

Their training is now over, and I feel like we can finally see the results.

 

Here is a set of monthly stats from before they were hired:

1393 New Tickets
1282 Solved
4822 Interactions with players on tickets
Net result: +111 Tickets

On weeks like this, we actually lost ground, because we ended up with more tickets than we started with.

 

Here are the monthly stats from 1 month after they were hired:

1224 New Tickets

1536 Solved
4038 Interactions with players on tickets
Net result: -312 Tickets

In this case, we gained ground by end up with 312 less tickets than we started with.

 

Right now we have 2358 total tickets open (unsolved).

1944 of those tickets have not been touched (contacted).

208 of those tickets are waiting on responses from players.

 

We have more changes coming to our Support site, that will help players properly categorize their issues to help get those tickets into the proper queue and addressed faster.

 

Many players ask what our most common tickets are, so here is a breakdown:

• Issues getting into their account 31%
• Scammers / Reports on other players 25%
• Issues with gameplay 20%
• Issues with purchases 14%
• Tech support 10%

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

I haven't updated this thread in a while, and some players feel like our Support has gotten worse.

So I thought I would post a raw comparison between the last update near Thanksgiving and now.

 

In November we had the following stats:

 

We had 2,358 total tickets open (unsolved).

1,944 of those tickets had not been touched (contacted).

 

Here are the current Customer Support stats:

 

We currently have 2,060  total tickets open (unsolved) which is 298  tickets better than November.

1,246 of those tickets have not been touched (contacted) which is 698 tickets better than November.

 

I fully acknowledge that we still have players who have waited 2+ months to sort out their ticket, and that is still an unacceptable time to wait. Please know that we will continue to bring these stats down till we get response times to industry standards.

 

A couple players asked why we haven't gone to an outsource support group, but that's not something we can do.

My team has to be trained across 4-5 different systems that they use to collect data and manage accounts.

All of those require high security protection, which we can't arbitrarily grant to external companies.

 

However, we will continue to hire and train new supporters. 

I appreciate your patience.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi all,

 

We are making good progress on pushing hard to clear as many tickets as possible.

As of today, there are 1,192 total tickets open (unsolved) which is 812 less than two weeks ago.

There are 812 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted) which is 434 less than two weeks ago.

This is significant progress.

 

As of yesterday, Customer Support was following up on tickets from January 6th 2019.

If your ticket is older than that, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

More progress on catching up with tickets.

 

As of today, there are 1,033 total tickets open (unsolved) which is 159 less than two weeks ago.

There are 831 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted) which is slightly higher than the last update.

 

 

I'm actually surprised we were able to keep pace and still bring the total open tickets down.

The last three weeks had a significant uptick in support requests.

We had one on vacation for a week.

We had another out with a family issue.

And the entire team has struggled with getting sick (it's rampaging through our offices right now).

 

Everyone was back healthy on Friday, and as of yesterday Customer Support was following up on one tickets from January 26th 2019.

If your ticket is older than that, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi all,

 

It's been two weeks since the last update.

 

As of today, there are 1,025 total tickets open (unsolved) which is slightly less than last time.

There are 828 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted) which is slightly less than last time.

We're adding two more supporters next week.

 

As of yesterday, Customer Support was following up on tickets from Feb 15th 2019.

If your ticket is older than that, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi all,

 

I meant to post the stats on Friday like normal, but missed it.

Instead here are the stats from this morning with a small disclaimer. We tend to be at our worst on Mondays, since tickets accrue over the weekend when less staff are working.

 

As of today, there are 1,064 total tickets open (unsolved) which is slightly higher than last time.

However there are only 773 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted). That is substantially less than last time (even more so because its Monday).

 

As of this morning, Customer Support was following up on tickets from March 7th, which means we've been able to pull the response time in to slightly more than 1.5 months.

If your ticket is older than that, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi all,

 

Back on my regular Friday schedule of updating Customer Support status.

 

As of today, there are 1,137 total tickets open (unsolved) which is up significantly from last time. Not sure why we saw a spike in tickets this week, but I'll have the team look into it.

Despite the influx of new tickets, there are only 695 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted). That is down from Monday by a considerable amount.

 

We have a couple of straggler KTTC tickets, but the majority of regular tickets are now from March 21st. We are so close to being at the 30 day mark for tickets.

If your ticket is older than that, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

It's been a while since the last Customer Support status update.

 

Little Orbit had a very rocky data migration, which lead to downtime. Downtime leads to increased player tickets.

From April 29 to May 13th, we got ~2x the normal volume of tickets.

 

Unfortunately, this was made worse, because our internal customer service tools were down for nearly 5 days of that period.

That means my staff couldn't open or solve any tickets during that time.

As of today, there are 1,489 total tickets (unsolved) which is up significantly from last time. 

And there are 1,075 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted).

We've pulled a couple team members from QA and other roles to help get caught up.

 

The majority of regular tickets are now from March 28th. Which means we lost ground from being nearly at the 30 day mark and shifted out to the 45 day mark for answering tickets.

If your ticket is older than the 28th, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

I forgot to post these stats on Friday, May 31st.

 

As of today, there are 1,334 total tickets (unsolved) which is down more than 150 tickets from last time. 

And there are 1,117 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted).

We are continuing to push hard to catch up and get the total tickets under 1000.

 

I am happy to say that on May 31st we were answering tickets from April 23rd, which means we are now at 38 day response times.

Still objectively terrible, but we are very close to getting under a month.

 

If your ticket is older than April 23rd, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status.

 

Thanks,
Matt

[MattScott 15242]

Hi everyone,

 

As of today, there are 1,254 total tickets (unsolved) which is down from last time. 

And there are 1,036 total tickets that have not been touched (contacted).

 

Today we are answering tickets from May 2nd, which means we are now at a 35 day response time.

 

If your ticket is older than May 2nd, and we have not reached out, then I recommend updating your ticket and asking for status.

 

Thanks,