Average customer response time halved in 12 months, thanks to new support centre

A little over a year ago, we announced the launch of our new support centre, in a drive to help customers find answers to their questions faster.

With these changes, not only can our users find answers to their questions more quickly and without having to get in touch with GoCardless, but those who do get in touch receive a greatly-improved service.

I’m delighted to share that since launching the support centre:

• On average, we’re now responding to queries within 6 business hours; a huge improvement when compared with our previous 13-hour average.

• Our response time SLA has reduced from two working days to one.

• The average time it takes us to resolve a customer query has also greatly reduced.

• The level of service we’re able to offer has become far more consistent.

Our efforts have gained us some recognition and I’m delighted to share that last week, the team picked up the award for Most Effective Self Service Initiative at the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards (ECCCSAs).

Data-driven approach to improving support

It’s true to say that our customers are in the driving seat when it comes to improving the support we give, whether they realise it or not!

Since launching the support centre, we’ve been monitoring how our customers are using it, which resources they use the most and how they locate the content.

This, combined with the data we collect on the types and number of questions we receive from customers, has enabled us to improve what we do.

As well as creating lots of new support resources, we’ve also been tweaking the user experience, including:

• Changing the way we categorise articles to make information more easily accessible

  

  

• Changing the way we write article titles so they’re easier to find

• Adding widgets to help users to contact us or search for content more easily

• Adding a payment lookup tool to help people who've paid through GoCardless to identify unrecognised payments on their bank statements

• Separating out FAQs meant for people paying through GoCardless, to help minimise potential confusion for our merchants and partners

We're also better addressing the needs of our non-UK customers, translating our help resources into French and Spanish, (with German on its way!), and we've introduced a scalable process so we’ll be able to quickly launch support documentation in new languages too, as GoCardless expands around the world.

We still have lots of ideas about how to further improve the support we give to customers - fingers crossed we can do enough to defend our ECCCSA title next year!