Zone Customer Support: How does our team face challenges and maintain quality?

I am Martin, the Customer Support Manager, and I would like to introduce you to what we do at Zone customer support.

Numbers

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

• 49,000 virtual servers
• 141,000+ domains
• 1200+ VPS servers
• 200+ private servers
• 260,000+ e-mail accounts
• 50,000+ active e-mail users

Customer requests per year:

• 57,000+ messages (10,000 of which have are sent as offline messages from Webchat)
• 17,000+ phone calls (average response time 10 seconds, call duration approx. 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 13 people who provide support to our customers in Estonian, English, Russian and Finnish. In addition to phones, letters and webchat, customer support also manages the web-based help page help.zone.eu, where more than 400 different articles are published in those four languages. Of course we cannot forget the second level technical support and accounting staff making up an additional force, consisting of four 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. It is for this reason 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.

In 2024, we also created a new challenge for ourselves, which is to align the quality management of the customer support department according to the ISO9001:2015 standard. This is to make sure we maintain the quality of our customer service in different markets. 

We invest in products and processes

We are, of course, happy about our constantly growing customer base, but it also means our workload is constantly growing, too. This reduction in the workload is certainly caused by the combination of three important things:

1) Efficient user interface and well-designed customer journeys

I’d like to give a shout-out to the Zone development team for making well-designed and tested decisions! I also want to say a big thank you to all our customers, because we really listen to your opinions and constructive feedback is always taken into account! ? The fewer questions a customer has when ordering or using services, the better experience it is for the customer, and for this reason, customer service has more time to deal with more substantial questions.

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 ongoing basis and any errors discovered are corrected within minutes. Our customer support may also write new articles as fast as their fingers can type, 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 webchat, 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 constantly switch between the windows on the workstation, 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

One 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 do 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.