Hello again. 

When I last wrote about support at Bamboo, I outlined a number of changes we were making to improve the customer experience. I’m happy to report that those, along with many other improvements are now in effect, and the results have been outstanding.

We’ve doubled the size of our support staff, both domestically and in our Vietnam office. We have also added dedicated staff to work with our team in Europe, and they now cover the majority of the business day for our European customers. We’ve implemented chat support, optimized and clarified our support processes and policies, improved self-help resources, enhanced the MyBamboo support portal, and made the availability and visibility of support generally more prominent on the Bamboo website. 

One of the top complaints I heard when I arrived at Bamboo earlier this year was that the support team too often relied on email as a primary means of communication, sometimes delaying what could have otherwise been a quick resolution to an issue. Our premium support customers are indeed entitled to callback support for high-severity issues, and I am happy to report that our telephone and remote-assisted resolutions have increased by threefold in the second half of 2010. We’ll never operate like a traditional inbound call center; the complexity of the problems we face, and the high skill level of our customers typically means that we can’t just look in a knowledge base for a quick answer. That said, I think the progress we have made in this area is making a real difference.

As you probably know, we also implemented a customer support satisfaction survey a few months ago. This survey goes out to every Bamboo customer when their ticket is closed in our support system. I am happy to report that we have improved in this area for four straight months, and our six-week rolling average for customer satisfaction now stands at 90% satisfied/very satisfied. Given the volume of business we do, and the breadth of products we support, this is quite an accomplishment. Additionally, I am personally following up with every dissatisfied customer, and making sure that we have done everything possible to make their experience with Bamboo Solutions a positive one.

We still have room to improve; I want to shoot past 90% customer satisfaction and strive for 100%. We also have some challenges ahead as SharePoint 2010 gathers momentum, but I am proud of the progress we have made so far and confident that we’ll only continue to get better and better.

Please feel free to leave a comment on this post, or contact me directly if you have any questions, comments, or concerns: Mike.OBrien@bamboosolutions.com.