Want to win in SaaS without having to ship another feature?
Upgrade your quality almost instantly?
Do true 24×7 support, real-time, for real, that's great
It's like Magic
No 4 hour ticket turn around
No "go to our wiki"It's Magic .. because no one in B2B does it
— Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) June 5, 2023
Gorgias a little while back did a very interesting deep dive on its 10,000+ customers for its help desk and contact center solution. Gorgias is 100% focused on e-commerce vendors, and not SaaS companies per se, but I suspect its data is pretty consistent with most folks using an online support tool.
And what they found made me cry a bit. 🙂
While 44% of the 5,000 respondents thought they provided excellent customer support — only 1.3% actually did! In fact, average response times were 12 hours, versus a target of < 10 minutes!
Gorgias defined top-tier or Diamond support as follows:
- First response time in < 10 minutes. I mean, this isn’t even very good IMHO.
- Resolution time in < 1 hour. Again, really not even that great.
- 4.75 or higher rating. Roughly, you can translate this into an 80 CSAT or higher. Harder in my experience.
As you can see here, very very few of their 6,000 customers actually were able to achieve top-tier support status, and even second-from-the-top status was only achieved by 6.6%!
A few other related learnings they found:
- The more chat is available, and the more phone support is available, the better the support, and the happier customers are.
- The more CS agents you have, on average, the better the level of support. Staff up here, folks.
- The higher the ACV, the better the support. This makes sense, but perhaps it shouldn’t be the case.
- Teams with goals for their support teams performed better. We know this, but good to see the data supports it as well.
Pretty interesting, and a bit sad.
A few recommendations:
#1. Make sure you know how good your support is. It likely is much worse than you think. Much worse.
#2. Make sure you measure your initial response time and resolution times. Do you know? Are you world-class? Look at the data above to know.
#3. Enough with the bots. Do more chat and yes, phone support. Bots have their place, but CSAT is tied to also doing real chat. Bots help. But bots rarely solve the tough problems on their own.
A bit more on the overall topic here:
