 With spyware (and spyware awareness) on the rise, Webroot Software, developers of Spy Sweeper and other PC utilities, was pleased to welcome a surge of new customers after receiving high-profile accolades. But last summer, a rush of downloads and new customers created a support backlog of nearly a month for the company's small telephone and e-mail support group. "It was fine, until the floodgates opened," says Ling Richardson, director of consumer support for Webroot.
Since the uptick in interest was unlikely to go away any time soon, Webroot needed to make a fast change in its support process. "We needed a way to be more proactive and preventative with our support. We needed to have a knowledge base, one that could be updated several times a day, and a ticketing system so we could control the information coming in," Richardson says.
The company opted to adopt a support system from Parature. "Because we're an external help desk, the support tool needed to be very simple to operate. We can't take time to train people how to use the tool—it needed to be very easy to use and very professional," she says.
Despite having the new ticketing and support queue system in place, Webroot has not taken steps to break up support team staffing by channel, but Richardson notes that the company has been able to roll out the support tools easily to the wider organization. "I can have my more senior and technical staff focus on the more involved, in-depth issues." The company is also planning to extend the use of the knowledge base to marketing and reseller support.
Customers have availed themselves of the knowledge base offering in droves, to the tune of about one million visitors since it went online. "And we've taken nowhere near one million phone calls," amassing just over 150,000 total support tickets over the same time frame.
Not content to assume the customers are getting the answers they seek, Richardson recently ran a large-scale customer survey, in part to find out whether customers felt the knowledge base was a viable alternative to picking up the phone or sending an e-mail. "77 percent of customers said they did try to open the knowledge base before opening a [staffed] support ticket, and that was shocking good news," she says.
In all, the new support plan worked, and Webroot was able to whittle its support queue down in short order without a dramatic outlay in staffing. "Now, we've able to prevent issues coming in to the support team—89 percent of customers who go to the support web page find their answers, and that's helped me stay in control of headcount. We probably would need three times as many people if we didn't have the knowledge base."
While still a work-in-progress as far as the overall project goes, Webroot is an interesting example of one of the major real-world reasons customer interactions take a step forward—the old system becomes unmanageable.
To me, the most important takeaway here is another data point supporting the axiom that as support channels expand, so does support volume—with the knowledge base online, customers are far more inclined to make casual support inquiries than they would be to pick up the phone or even to send an e-mail.
None of the companies mentioned in this article have been clients of CRMuse LLC or Jason Compton for at least the past six months.
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