V4 Update #11: Ratings, feedback, surveys and quality control

Welcome to the eleventh in a series of Version 4 development updates and previews. Preview #10 looked at changes to the SLA features, ticket escalation rules and work schedules.

In this preview we will take you through a brand new feature we are introducing to V4 – ratings.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Metrics and measurements are critical to being able to continually improve and refine your customer support. You know that measuring customer support can be tricky, so we have turned the problem over to your support desk.

We have implemented an elegant and easy-to-use system to collect feedback from your customers and measure your performance.

Solicit feedback from your customers

V4 introduces ratings: a simple, centralized way to collect feedback from your customers on a variety of correspondence and items – support tickets, individual ticket responses, live chats, knowledgebase articles, and so on.

Each rating translates to a number of stars. Your customers are asked to award a certain number of stars for each rating you create – this is a very simple point-and-click process.

We thought long and hard about how best to present this to users, and we think we have the right balance between detail and ease of entry. If we ask for too much or make it too difficult to input, your customers are less likely to provide feedback.

The ability to create multiple ratings gives you the granularity needed to harvest quality and refined data from which you can monitor your team’s good points and identify areas for improvement.

Because providing feedback has been made so simple, you can expect a lot of your customers to volunteer good feedback.

Rating options

Ticket and chat related ratings can be linked to a specific department, enabling you to collect different kinds of feedback depending on the department in which the chat or ticket was handled.

Perform internal quality auditing with ‘internal’ ratings

The customer is, of course, the best judge of the support your team provides. However, you may also wish to perform internal quality assessments and auditing. To facilitate this, we have added a public and private switch to each rating.

The screenshot below shows a chat log being viewed by a staff user. The two ratings – Overall satisfaction and Quality of communication – have been submitted by the user. The Politeness rating is internal; hidden from users and can be modified only by your staff.

When a rating is set to private, it cannot be accessed or seen by your customers. It can only be set and viewed by your staff users (who have the appropriate permission to do so).

Live chat surveys

At the end of a chat your customer is invited to take a satisfaction survey. This survey result is tied to the chat history (in the staff control panel) and is recorded as a message in the live chat area which allows your staff to follow up with the user.

Individual ticket posts (replies)

The screenshot below shows a icket reply, viewed by a user in the support portal. As well as being able to submit overall ticket ratings and feedback, your users can provide ratings for each individual reply.

Ticket survey

Once a ticket has been closed (or set to a status where the “is resolved” flag is enabled), the customer is invited to take a satisfaction survey. The link to the survey contains a unique auth code which bypasses the need to log into the support center before completing the survey.

We have found that this immeasurably increases the likelihood that your customers will complete the survey, rather than abandon it at a login prompt.

The survey form your customer sees is shown below. It is clear, simple and to the point. We plan on adding custom field support to this area.

The ticket view in the staff control panel is shown below. The ticket survey results are displayed in the information and action side-bar, on the left.

The contents of the comments field from the survey is attached to the ticket as a reply (marked clearly as a survey response). This keeps correspondence connected and tightly coupled so that you do not lose track of the support issue followed by survey related correspondence, should you wish to follow up.

Plan and schedule updates

Our last estimate for the public beta release of V4 was this quarter. We are not going to release it this quarter, but it won’t be long afterward. Over the next few weeks we will be rolling V4 out on our own support desk (you may have seen that we have almost finished doing so with live chat). The public beta release will follow this.

We still intend to provide Kayako developers with access to protocols, APIs and an early preview of the framework. Apologies for the intermittent updates – as we’re getting closer to launch things are getting very hectic! We hope you’re as excited about receiving V4 as we are about releasing it!

Our next preview will feature more detailed looks into ticketing and e-mail management. Stay tuned!