A transparent look at our customer support stats and how they compare to industry benchmarks
/Two things that are close to our hearts here at Ticket Tailor HQ…
World class customer support
Being honest and transparent with our customers
So with that said we wanted to share some stats on our customer support performance over the last 12 months. It’s something we’ve invested hugely in over the years and our users regularly tell us it’s an important reason they choose to work with us and so we wanted to see how our stats stack up.
Why is customer support so important?
At Ticket Tailor we’re acutely aware that every event organiser has a huge number of ticketing and event registration platforms to choose from (here are some sites to help you compare the alternative ticketing platforms). Clearly the most important thing to any event creator is the quality of the technology and features that any given platform can offer. After all, it’s no use having great customer support if the platform doesn’t have the seating charts your venue desperately requires or you can’t scan guests in at the door. That’s why providing a great platform with a bucket load of great features is always our number 1 focus. If you’re interested - you can see all our latest product updates here on our blog. These new features are always informed directly by our users, who we regularly talk to in order to understand which features are most important to them.
However, online ticketing, like many software solutions, will always need to provide some human hand holding in order for users to get the most out of the platform and help users navigate through the process of selling event tickets online. This human interaction is particularly important within the events industry - users are often facing a long list of items on their to-do list in order to prepare for their event - the last thing they want is a long wait for answers to their questions.
Not only does it keep our customers happy, it also keeps our business healthy - in fact, a study by Deloitte & Touche found that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable. We think that sounds like a serious win-win for everyone!
What are the important stats to track to measure the quality of your customer support?
We spend a lot of time tracking every element of the performance of Ticket Tailor - and like anything, you can get lost in the numbers if you want to. That’s why we keep it simple when monitoring the performance of our customer support and primarily look at 4 numbers:
First response times
Median first response times
Customer support satisfaction score
Volume of conversations
In addition to these, we also track Net Promoter Score (NPS) which gives an overall customer loyalty and satisfaction score of Ticket Tailor as a whole. Check out a recent summary of our NPS score.
What are first response times and how does Ticket Tailor perform?
First response times show how long a user has to wait on average for a response to their initial question. Most of these messages come to us via our chat feature, but these stats also include messages via email and Facebook Messenger. First response rate is one of the most important elements of keeping customer satisfaction high. If you have a burning question, you don’t want to be waiting a long time for an answer!
Ticket Tailor: First Response Times for 2019/20
You can see from the chart above that on average we respond to users between 3 and 4 minutes after the initial question is received. Our commitment to users is to respond within 10 minutes so we’re chuffed to keep it under 4 minutes most months.
Benchmarks vary depending on the industry and the way the messages are received. Here are some common recommended benchmarks:
for email - 24 hours or less
for socials - 2 hours or less
for chat - 10 minutes or less for a real person (a few seconds if it’s a bot responding)
How do median response times compare?
Median First Response Time (Median FRT) represents the median time between when a ticket is initially created and when the first public reply is sent. This metric is similar to our existing average First Reply Time except, instead of taking the average we use the median instead.
Ticket Tailor Median First Response Times for 2019/20
For those of you who are a few too many years away from your last math lesson, a quick reminder: the median is the middle score for a set of data that has been arranged in order of magnitude. So the median can give a fairer representation of the most likely time a customer should expect to wait for a response.
Over the last 12 months every single month has been under 2.5 minutes and the last few months have been under 90 seconds⚡️. We’re super proud of these times and believe it makes a real difference to the Ticket Tailor experience.
The holy grail of customer support - our customer satisfaction score
After every conversation we ask the user whether they thought our customer support was “Amazing”, “Great”, “OK”, “Bad” or “Terrible”. This is the most important metric that we track in our customer support team. After all, there is no point in responding super quickly to the first message if you then don’t get your question answered, or if it doesn’t feel like there is a friendly and understanding human on the other end of the line!
Ticket Tailor Customer satisfaction scores for 2019/20
You can see from these stats that over 93% of conversations resulted in an “Amazing” or “Great” review. According to industry benchmarks breweries have the highest average customer satisfaction scores with average CSAT scores of 85% (no indication whether the score is taken before or after alcohol has been consumed). Unfortunately they don’t list ticket platform benchmarks - but we’re pretty sure at 93% we’d be doing very well amongst our peers.
We’re not resting on our laurels though - 3% of conversations giving us “Bad” or “Terrible” means there is still room for improvement and we’ll be working hard over the next 12 months to reduce those negative responses.
Real people with real knowledge gives really good results
We often get asked by other tech companies what our secret is to our customer satisfaction scores. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts, but the answer is relatively simple. We ensure everyone who speaks to our customers has the following things:
Deep platform knowledge: don’t tell our founder Jonny but we’re pretty sure our customer support team now know the ins and outs of the product better than him 🤫
People that care: it’s not just about knowing the correct answer to a query - it’s about caring and wanting to help our users solve their issues. And our customer support team live that out every day!
A passion for the product and the company: finally, we’re trying to create more than just another tech platform - we want our product to have a positive impact on the community and people we interact with. Customer support is the shop front to that; our team get why that is important and translate that into every conversation with our users.
A huge thank you to our customer support team for all their hard work over the last 12 months 🙌.
