Jollity Introduces Helpdesk

Why, oh WHY support tickets? Are we turning evil?

No, not evil. I just want to take better care of you, our client. Over the last few months, Jollity has outgrown my email inbox. I noticed my average turnaround times for requests sometimes getting up to 5-7 days. Our clients deserve better. All of our client communication was silo'd exclusively through me. Sometimes, work would get done but clients wouldn't find out for several days. Yikes. In our world, that's too long. I always vowed to deliver personalized, better service to clients than what I saw in our industry. We differentiate through personalized, marketing-savvy, smart solutions for clients. We're the marketers who code! We think about your business with every request and come up with solutions, alternatives, and consulting advice that will help your company grow and make more money.

We have been testing our new setup in the background for a while, and now we're ready for prime time! 

What you can expect (summarized: continued awesomeness)

I am committed to maintaining that higher level of service we promise through Jollity's growth. I needed to find a way to achieve 3 important missions:

1. Maintain our smart, marketing-savvy, consultant level of service. We must stay awesome (or get more awesome).
2. Get back to resolving ALL client requests in a reasonable timeframe - for simple requests, I consider this to be 48 hours or less.
3. Affordability. I aimed for a solution that did NOT require an hourly support rate hike. No change to your billing setup at all. The market rates we see for our work run around $135-$250/hour. Can you imagine paying as much as you pay your lawyer per hour? #letsnotgothere

To accomplish #1, we needed the right people. Lucky us, we already have some. We have added a few more WordPress developers considered to be among the top 2% in the industry worldwide. Yea, they're pretty awesome. To accomplish #2, we needed to take me out of the middle of every conversation. Revolving the business around yourself is a classic founder mistake, and I made it. Funny thing is, the talent has always been far more than me - designers, developers, and marketers have contributed to everything Jollity does for years; they've just been in the background. Well, that's just silly. I picked and vetted the Jollity team because of their top talent AND excellent communication skills, so they should get to talk to our clients too. Now we have a project manager on board helping us, as well as developers who can chime in as needed.

So how's it work?

You, the client, fill out the ticketing form on our Client Support page. We put buttons all over our jollity.io website to make sure Client Support is always easy to find. I REALLY wanted to make reaching us quick and easy for you. Here's what I focused on:

1. Support chat - the fastest, easiest way to get us. It's monitored by 1-2 of us at any given time. BUT as I said, we're a small team, so we can't promise 24/7 chat availability (unless you'd like me to double all of your prices...). For quick, easy questions, you can chat us. Chat tells you if one of us is available or not. If not, we still get back to your chat message via support email as long as you've given us your email address in the chat window. Our chat is meant to be EASY, so we require NO information upfront before you get access to us live. But if you want us to get back to you later, you will have to give us an email :-).
2. Support ticket - fill out a form, we see it and jump on it. We get back to you via email! It's as simple as that. I aimed to keep our form as simple as humanly possible while giving you the opportunity to explain what you need all at once.
3. Email - Once you've interacted with us, you'll have our support email address, which you can use to open a new ticket.

How we beat the system with a system (and why our helpdesk is the best)

See what I did there? ;-). Support tickets can feel less... personal. It feels like you've become an anonymous number in a cog instead of an important client. Or that's how it feels to me when I use tickets. However, ticketing is important for us to approach support as a team (and remember that team is the key to getting back to you consistently faster), so we are personalizing the system as much as we can. Here's how we made our system BETTER THAN ALL THE REST: 

1. You'll work consistently with 1-2 team members throughout the support ticket: me and our project manager. You will not have to re-explain yourself to a new person at random. We are a small business who is personally familiar with you and your company's website(s).
2. You still just email, you'll just hear from us via email. I picked a ticketing setup that did NOT require you, the client, to create and remember a new set of login credentials to access us. Having to login to a helpdesk is the most annoying thing on the planet (perhaps dramatic, but it seriously sucks). I have over 200 sets of logins for different companies' help desks and every system is different; it's out of control. We are dedicated to supporting you how YOU like to communicate: email and chat.

This is getting long, and if I still have your attention I'm likely to lose you soon to the next email that pings you or customer awaiting your attention. Our team is here if you have questions or issues while you adjust to the system. And remember, when you need to reach us, just visit our website and click on Client Support, or chat with us. We put that support button all over the place.