Sneak Peek: Feedback Tracking (Plugin)
Community, Sneak Peek October 14th, 2008
posted by Jeff StandenThe new Feedback Tracking plugin helps you capture the valuable praise and criticism that would otherwise be buried along with closed tickets (even worse, after only a single front-line worker reads it). This feedback can be pooled into lists which share this insight with decision makers who may not normally be involved with reading helpdesk e-mail.
Some examples of overlooked value you can extract from helpdesk conversations:
- Cancels - Ask departing clients a quick question or two on their way out the door and track the interesting responses. They usually have some valuable and candid feedback about what you could be doing better.
- Mindshare/Goodwill - Track referrals: how did people hear from you and what was said? This helps you see if you’re getting your message out.
- Testimonials - Capture testimonials in a completely natural way. You can look through this list to find comments to use in your marketing campaigns or to share on your website. It’s also great to read these comments as a team to counterbalance the fact that customer service usually means dealing with problems most of the day. Remind people what’s going right.
- Competition - Any time someone is providing their opinion on the contrast between you and your competition, track it! This is how real people in the marketplace think and make decisions.
The Feedback Tracking plugin isn’t limited to just things you find on tickets; you can use it to track feedback from live chats, community forums, blogs, phone calls, etc. You can track comments anonymously and you can save a link back to external resources (such as the full forum discussion from where you excerpted a quote).
There are also some nice usability-minded touches:
- You can highlight text from any ticket message, click ‘more’ (next to Reply) and ‘Capture Feedback’. This will automatically fill in the quote (no copy & paste!).
- When you add a new feedback entry from a ticket a new comment will be added to the conversation automatically. This summarizes the feedback you extracted to save other workers from the hassle of searching to see if something was already tracked yet.
Check out the screencast below to see the plugin in action. (If your company network blocks YouTube I’ll try to get an alternative link up shortly)
-Jeff@WGM
That´s pretty cool! We (at least: I) will love it!
@Marc yeah! We actually hit the new “Capture Feedback” so often over here that it scares me to think about the feedback that’s been buried over the years just because it came up in the middle of a support issue.
That’s a great idea Jeff!
However, when I saw the post what I thought you developed was a way for customers to rate tickets. That would be very nice feature to have. E.g. all email tickets have a link that customers click to rate a ticket (out of 5 stars) and add their own comment/suggestion which only the supervisor would see. That way, when the supervisors run a report, they can see the techs who scored the worst and those who had the best praises. This can only lead to better work. Btw, I have cerb4 installed and it is AMAZING. I refused to install it earlier due to import/export issue between v3->4 but after seeing what v4 can do, it makes v3 look like a datsun. However, the support center in v3 still beats v4. (Customers like having big buttons “Open Ticket” on the main page, not hidden on the sidebar)
That´s exactly what I thought! Great!
“I thought you developed was a way for customers to rate tickets. That would be very nice feature to have. E.g. all email tickets have a link that customers click to rate a ticket (out of 5 stars) and add their own comment/suggestion which only the supervisor would see.”
I thought this as well. I’ve been working on trying to integrate Lime Survey into my helpdesk in a way that I can do exactly that.
Yes, great idea guys.
Cerb4 does have a lot of great features, and it
keeps getting better. But, the ticket lack of
a ticket rating system for customers is a real
let down.
And, v3 support centers do look alot better
than v4’s. I know when I visit someone’s support
center, I do feel a lot more comfortable with
a support center that looks more like v3. The
people coming to our support center looking for
solutions are the ones that we need to make feel
comfortable.
Ticket/Worker ratings are definitely something we can still do. The only real complexity there is providing the interface where a customer rates their support experience, which would probably be a community tool. It’s easy to make community tools but it’s a little trickier to have Cerb know which tool to use when constructing a URL (such as the rating URL to append to outgoing e-mail). That’s all necessary because you wouldn’t want to direct customers to your helpdesk URL — that should remain private.
It should probably be a group-level thing to enable surveys when tickets are closed (if one hasn’t been sent for a given issue yet). I’ll make sure Joe@WGM sees this so he can track it on our wishlist. It’s come up a few times before and I’m sure we can do something with it.
@Tommy
I agree that the Cerb4 Support Center could use a lot of work. Sprucing that up is probably the #1 “unspoken” thing we could do to boost the project among web hosting related companies.
You can O.D. on my thoughts about the Support Center from a recent WebHostingTalk thread:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=5360493&postcount=55