Zone customer support or how our mighty dozen helps out 200,000 users

My name is Kaarel and this time I’m going to write about Zone customer support, and how you could make your company’s customer support more effective as well. By way of background, I’ve been involved in Zone customer support for almost 11 years, more than four of them as the customer support manager. During this time, I have dealt with tens of thousands of customer requests, key account management, active sales, and I have also had the customer’s role in many projects Zone has undertaken.

Numbers

Let me highlight some numbers to give you some idea of the efficiency and workload of Zone customer support today:

• 44,000+ virtual servers
• 125,000+ domains
• 1000+ VPS servers
• 200+ private servers
• 200,000+ e-mail accounts
• 45,000+ active e-mail users

Customer requests per year:

• 45,000+ e-mail messages
• 20,000+ phone calls (average response time 10 seconds, call duration approximately 4 minutes)
• 10,000+ live chats (average response time 1:30 min, duration approximately 16 minutes)

How many of us are there and how can we manage?

Today, Zone’s customer support team consists of 12 people who provide support to our customers in Estonian, English, Russian and Finnish. Besides managing telephone calls, e-mail and chat, the customer support team also maintains our online help site, help.zone.eu, with more than 400 articles published in four languages. We cannot of course forget the second level technical support and accounting staff making up an additional force, consisting of five people and working closely with the customer support team.

I could just end this article here and simply state the fact that Zone has the most professional customer service staff in the world, but actually I’ll write a bit more thoroughly about this.

We invest in people

We offer a large number of products that are highly technical and in many ways specific to Zone. Because of that a successful career in customer service requires a longer and more thorough preparation period than usual. It usually takes up to a year for a new customer service agent to catch up with the older ones in terms of efficiency. It is a necessary period of time during which we invest heavily in preparing and training the new employee and support their development. This is also the reason why it always pays off.

As our work is heavily influenced and guided by statistics, we actively keep an eye on this and try to think at least two years ahead: if the trends indicated by the numbers show that the workload of our customer support staff is starting to increase, we will look for a new person to join our team sooner rather than later.

We invest in products and processes

The number of Zone customers increased by nearly 10 per cent in 2021. At the same time, the workload of the customer support team decreased by nearly 15 per cent. This reduction in the workload is certainly caused by the combination of three important things:

1) Efficient user interface and well-designed customer journeys

Here’s a shout-out to the Zone development team for really carefully thought out and tested decisions! I would also like to say a big thank you to all our customers, because we really listen to your opinions and constructive feedback is always appreciated! ? Because the fewer questions you have when ordering or using services, the better your customer experience, and for this reason, the customer service has more time to deal with more substantive issues.

2) Increased emphasis on resolving load-generating problems

We have a virtually real-time overview of the most frequently asked questions to our customer support. This allows us to invest the time available to us in the most optimal way and e.g. deal with picking the low-hanging fruits, so to say – i.e. deal with the issues that raise a disproportionate number of questions, but are in fact easily solved. Sometimes, for example, it is enough to replace a single word in the user interface or add a direct link to an e-mail, and no more customer requests concerning this or that “hot” issue.

3) A constantly evolving public help environment

Managing the Zone help.zone.eu public help site is the responsibility of all members of our support team. This means that the most popular articles are updated on an on-going-basis and any errors discovered are corrected within minutes. Our customer support may also write new articles as fast as their fingers can print, so that popular questions arising overnight could always be resolved in HelpZones.

The right tools

As far as I can remember, Zone has always used some kind of management tool for handling customer requests – whether developed in-house or purchased from outside sources. Without a so-called shared inbox solution, it is not possible to work with multiple people, especially given the growing expectations of our customers to our customer support.

At the end of 2021, our customer support team embarked on what at first appeared to be a very daunting journey: to replace all (i.e. not just one, but each and every one!) of our customer support channel management tools. We decided to switch to the Zendesk Suite platform, and as a result we now operate a fully-fledged omnichannel customer management software. This means that a customer service agent sees all their customer support channels in one window: phone, e-mail, live chat, Facebook, Twitter and whatever else we want to offer our users in the future.

The biggest advantage of an omnichannel solution is that we always see the customer’s history. When answering a call, we can instantly find the data concerning the customer or discover the lack of such data, meaning the customer is a new one :). It has also eliminated the need to switch between the windows on the workstation constantly, which significantly reduces potential errors and saves time. We ordered the Zendesk migration and management service along with the licences via Datafox, and I can safely say that this project would probably have been a total failure without their help.

Yes, you can also order and purchase Zendesk directly from the manufacturer but Datafox already has five years of experience in Estonia with Zendesk products and their various integrations, so they can offer professional service. This can potentially save tens or even hundreds of hours spent searching for various bugs, or communicating with Zendesk.

In conclusion

I can confidently say that over the years our customer support has matured into a very efficient organism in the Zone ecosystem, and we are able to cope with any challenges related to the use of our services. Development is, however, a continuous process, and we are constantly learning and evolving. Admittedly, we, too, slip up occasionally, but thanks to this, and to a large extent your feedback, dear customers, we learn valuable and priceless lessons that help us further improve both the customer service process and the customer experience.