How we improved the work of the support service in Yandex.Mail
Yandex.Mail is developing very fast: over the past two years, its audience has grown almost one and a half times to more than 18M people per month. For such growth to be possible, technical development must also go very quickly - every week we roll out two releases with improvements and changes.
But in order to make a good service, it’s not enough to work with the technical side - you need to organize the organizational part. Including fast and efficient customer support.
Over the past year we have implemented a project for its reorganization. We want to tell now how we conceived it, what metrics were set and what happened.
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How would you explain to your grandmother how to set up an IMAP email client? And try to find out by phone the reason why parents do not turn on the computer or load one or another website.
Employees of Yandex.Mail User Support Services do this for hundreds of different grandmothers, parents and children, and not by phone or in person, but in multi-volume email correspondence. We ask clarifying questions, please attach a screenshot and ask questions again. So we work incognito seven days a week under pseudonyms Timofey Zhuravlev, Lev Dobrov and Yulya Cloud.
Today, the Yandex.Mail and Mail support service for the domain employs 6 people responding to user emails. We do not have a division into beginners and specialists: everyone can set a task to develop a new feature or come to the head of the service and demand that something be urgently fixed for users.
The average age of the guys from the support is 24 years. Almost everyone with a university degree or still studying. There are those who work remotely. For example, from Kiev and St. Petersburg.
The standard schedule: five days a week for eight hours. But staff shifts are distributed in such a way that they look after letters from early morning until late at night, seven days a week. Every weekday in the workplace is from three to five people (depending on the day of the week), and on weekends - two or three. Usually their strength is enough to respond to the hundreds of letters arriving per day or to process almost a thousand if an accident happens.
This was not always the case.
A year ago - in the spring of 2012 - the support service consisted of 8 employees working from Monday to Friday; Saturday and Sunday were days off. All the guys responded to the letters and in parallel tried to solve additional problems. Within 24 hours we had time to respond to only 60-70% of letters, the rest were answered on the second or even the third day.
Given the rapid pace of development of Yandex. Mail, it becomes obvious that the support service sample of 2012 did not correspond to the volume and scale of the service.
To change the situation, the first thing we needed was to determine our goals and answer the basic questions: “Why is our support service for us? After all, there are many projects without it - and nothing. Who needs support more — users or the development team? ”
For ourselves, we found the following answer: the quality of the service directly depends on the quality of the support service. The faster the user receives an answer, the more loyal he is to the service, the better he becomes. People want to be heard and help the service team improve it.
As a result, our response to users and regular feedback for the service team have become our new indicators.
To achieve goals, we needed to solve several problems:
As already mentioned, a year ago we responded to 60-70% of letters within 24 hours after receipt. Now we have set ourselves an ambitious goal - to answer 100% of letters within 24 hours. But since it is impossible to just take it and do it “tomorrow”, the task was divided into trimesters: by September 1, 2012, the goal was 70% of letters within 24 hours, by December - 80%, by March 2013 - more than 90%.
At the same time drew a graph with the forecast.
To improve the response time, it was necessary to develop a new KPI.
Previously, each support KPI was the number of responses per day and, of course, user ratings. The response rate was very poorly correlated with the deadlines: the support was not clear why they were fulfilling the rate, and the timing was still bad. Therefore, the new KPI was the time of opening the ticket - that is, at the end of the working day in the queue there should not be letters that will become a daily allowance before the employee comes to work tomorrow.
In addition to the fact that with such KPIs, the response time has improved, the new norm has a positive effect on their quality: support systems no longer chase after the quantity, but can thoughtfully and non-routinely respond to the user's letter.
Changed and monitoring work. Earlier, we saw in real time only the number of answered tickets for each employee, which was in no way connected with the new KPI. Therefore, we began daily to take statistics on the response time for each queue. This allowed us to better see the problem queues, eliminate natural defects in statistics, and quickly respond to changes in the situation.
We had the usual form of feedback, which gave only one opportunity - to write a letter to the Support Service. The simple form generated a huge number of letters with low information content, and, as a result, we had to have 2 lines of support service in order to somehow structure this stream:
First of all, we redid the structure of the feedback - it became a tree. With the help of prompts, the user can detail his problem and at the same time give us the opportunity to put his letter directly into the hands of a second-line specialist. On the basis of the existing knowledge base on the main problems of users, we have compiled branches, each of which ends with a certain recipe and form for communication if the proposed solution did not help.
As a result of the transition to such feedback, it was possible to reduce the daily number of incoming letters by almost 1.5 times - despite the fact that the audience of Yandex as a whole and Yandex.Mail in particular continues to grow.
After some experimentation with the formulations and visual arrangement of quick recipes, we finally saw that the tickets go exactly to those specialists who are needed. Plus, we managed to separate the questions about Mail from the questions about other services.
We updated all the information about typical user problems and collected it in one place. In addition, they assigned a person responsible for the relevance and structure of our knowledge base. We dealt with the tasks for the service, described the rules of interaction with each department of developers, and also appointed a person responsible for it. The supports stopped spending time searching for the necessary information and updating the clusters during working hours, which made it possible to respond to more letters.
Now that the marriage has become a minimum, the knowledge base was relevant, and the tasks were not rotten, we began work on switching to a seven-day working week.
To do this, as it turned out, is not so easy. It is impossible to force a person to work seven days a week, since attentiveness and, as a result, the quality of the response primarily suffer from this. Therefore, it was necessary to allocate work schedules in such a way that every day there were at least two support stations at the workplace (this is enough to parse the queue), but at the same time all the guys worked according to the usual 5/2 schedule. Moreover, on weekends, employees must work who can answer the widest range of questions, not only from their field of knowledge. After a month of experimentation, renewal of contracts and even hiring new employees, we finally succeeded. The transition to support 7 days a week made it possible to respond to the overwhelming majority of emails within 24 hours, and also made it possible to track problems that arose at the service much faster.
We have achieved the goal!
According to statistics for March, more than 92% of Yandex.Mail users receive a response within 24 hours after contacting support.
Besides!
Since the number of letters dropped significantly and we got some time free, we decided to spend it with use and think: what else can we do to optimize our work. Namely, we collected statistics on tags (each letter in mail support is marked with a specific tag, which means its own problem area; for example, Address Book or HTTPS Download), identified the most frequent cases in several directions in mail support and set tasks , the solution of which could reduce the number of letters on these problems.
The challenge for the next few months is to start responding within hours.
But in order to make a good service, it’s not enough to work with the technical side - you need to organize the organizational part. Including fast and efficient customer support.
Over the past year we have implemented a project for its reorganization. We want to tell now how we conceived it, what metrics were set and what happened.
')
Theory
How would you explain to your grandmother how to set up an IMAP email client? And try to find out by phone the reason why parents do not turn on the computer or load one or another website.
Employees of Yandex.Mail User Support Services do this for hundreds of different grandmothers, parents and children, and not by phone or in person, but in multi-volume email correspondence. We ask clarifying questions, please attach a screenshot and ask questions again. So we work incognito seven days a week under pseudonyms Timofey Zhuravlev, Lev Dobrov and Yulya Cloud.
Today, the Yandex.Mail and Mail support service for the domain employs 6 people responding to user emails. We do not have a division into beginners and specialists: everyone can set a task to develop a new feature or come to the head of the service and demand that something be urgently fixed for users.
The average age of the guys from the support is 24 years. Almost everyone with a university degree or still studying. There are those who work remotely. For example, from Kiev and St. Petersburg.
The standard schedule: five days a week for eight hours. But staff shifts are distributed in such a way that they look after letters from early morning until late at night, seven days a week. Every weekday in the workplace is from three to five people (depending on the day of the week), and on weekends - two or three. Usually their strength is enough to respond to the hundreds of letters arriving per day or to process almost a thousand if an accident happens.
This was not always the case.
A year ago - in the spring of 2012 - the support service consisted of 8 employees working from Monday to Friday; Saturday and Sunday were days off. All the guys responded to the letters and in parallel tried to solve additional problems. Within 24 hours we had time to respond to only 60-70% of letters, the rest were answered on the second or even the third day.
Task
Given the rapid pace of development of Yandex. Mail, it becomes obvious that the support service sample of 2012 did not correspond to the volume and scale of the service.
To change the situation, the first thing we needed was to determine our goals and answer the basic questions: “Why is our support service for us? After all, there are many projects without it - and nothing. Who needs support more — users or the development team? ”
For ourselves, we found the following answer: the quality of the service directly depends on the quality of the support service. The faster the user receives an answer, the more loyal he is to the service, the better he becomes. People want to be heard and help the service team improve it.
As a result, our response to users and regular feedback for the service team have become our new indicators.
Condition
To achieve goals, we needed to solve several problems:
- Reduce response time.
- To ensure that people themselves find answers to questions that could be found without the help of a support service employee, and did not write letters on such occasions.
- Increase the information content of complaints and narrow down the problem at the stage of writing a letter to the support (sometimes you have to ask clarifying questions: screenshot, browser, playback conditions).
- Separate letters directly about Mail from letters about other services (Disk, Subscriptions, traffic rules, etc.).
- Simplify the transfer of knowledge of support service users.
- Go to the seven-day work week.
Decision
1. Reduce response time
As already mentioned, a year ago we responded to 60-70% of letters within 24 hours after receipt. Now we have set ourselves an ambitious goal - to answer 100% of letters within 24 hours. But since it is impossible to just take it and do it “tomorrow”, the task was divided into trimesters: by September 1, 2012, the goal was 70% of letters within 24 hours, by December - 80%, by March 2013 - more than 90%.
At the same time drew a graph with the forecast.
To improve the response time, it was necessary to develop a new KPI.
Previously, each support KPI was the number of responses per day and, of course, user ratings. The response rate was very poorly correlated with the deadlines: the support was not clear why they were fulfilling the rate, and the timing was still bad. Therefore, the new KPI was the time of opening the ticket - that is, at the end of the working day in the queue there should not be letters that will become a daily allowance before the employee comes to work tomorrow.
In addition to the fact that with such KPIs, the response time has improved, the new norm has a positive effect on their quality: support systems no longer chase after the quantity, but can thoughtfully and non-routinely respond to the user's letter.
Changed and monitoring work. Earlier, we saw in real time only the number of answered tickets for each employee, which was in no way connected with the new KPI. Therefore, we began daily to take statistics on the response time for each queue. This allowed us to better see the problem queues, eliminate natural defects in statistics, and quickly respond to changes in the situation.
2, 3, 4. We increase the information content of complaints, reduce the number of letters to support and divide them according to projects
We had the usual form of feedback, which gave only one opportunity - to write a letter to the Support Service. The simple form generated a huge number of letters with low information content, and, as a result, we had to have 2 lines of support service in order to somehow structure this stream:
- On the first line, the attendants answered the simplest questions and shared letters on projects, each of which described its own field of knowledge. For example, "Mail programs" or "Problems with loading Mail".
- Support on the second line gave answers to questions in their own directions, set tasks for service and resolved problem situations. Two lines of support services are almost always a big load, which means poor response times and lengthy correspondence.
First of all, we redid the structure of the feedback - it became a tree. With the help of prompts, the user can detail his problem and at the same time give us the opportunity to put his letter directly into the hands of a second-line specialist. On the basis of the existing knowledge base on the main problems of users, we have compiled branches, each of which ends with a certain recipe and form for communication if the proposed solution did not help.
As a result of the transition to such feedback, it was possible to reduce the daily number of incoming letters by almost 1.5 times - despite the fact that the audience of Yandex as a whole and Yandex.Mail in particular continues to grow.
After some experimentation with the formulations and visual arrangement of quick recipes, we finally saw that the tickets go exactly to those specialists who are needed. Plus, we managed to separate the questions about Mail from the questions about other services.
5. Unified knowledge base
We updated all the information about typical user problems and collected it in one place. In addition, they assigned a person responsible for the relevance and structure of our knowledge base. We dealt with the tasks for the service, described the rules of interaction with each department of developers, and also appointed a person responsible for it. The supports stopped spending time searching for the necessary information and updating the clusters during working hours, which made it possible to respond to more letters.
6. 24/7
Now that the marriage has become a minimum, the knowledge base was relevant, and the tasks were not rotten, we began work on switching to a seven-day working week.
To do this, as it turned out, is not so easy. It is impossible to force a person to work seven days a week, since attentiveness and, as a result, the quality of the response primarily suffer from this. Therefore, it was necessary to allocate work schedules in such a way that every day there were at least two support stations at the workplace (this is enough to parse the queue), but at the same time all the guys worked according to the usual 5/2 schedule. Moreover, on weekends, employees must work who can answer the widest range of questions, not only from their field of knowledge. After a month of experimentation, renewal of contracts and even hiring new employees, we finally succeeded. The transition to support 7 days a week made it possible to respond to the overwhelming majority of emails within 24 hours, and also made it possible to track problems that arose at the service much faster.
Result
We have achieved the goal!
According to statistics for March, more than 92% of Yandex.Mail users receive a response within 24 hours after contacting support.
Besides!
- The daily number of letters to the support fell 1.5 times compared to the same period last year.
- The number of specialists responsible only for replies to letters has decreased. Some of them have grown into managers and now help their colleagues work better and solve problems faster.
- The informativeness of the support response, as a result of users' voting, increased by 10 percent (from 75 to 85).
- We have a stock of employees in case of emergency. And this is in spite of the fact that fewer specialists have become in the support service in a year.
homework
Since the number of letters dropped significantly and we got some time free, we decided to spend it with use and think: what else can we do to optimize our work. Namely, we collected statistics on tags (each letter in mail support is marked with a specific tag, which means its own problem area; for example, Address Book or HTTPS Download), identified the most frequent cases in several directions in mail support and set tasks , the solution of which could reduce the number of letters on these problems.
The challenge for the next few months is to start responding within hours.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/175655/
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