Client Portal – What have we learned?

It’s been almost a year since Lineal introduced our new Client Portal, which allows our customers to not only raise new IT Support tickets direct into our systems, but review ticket progress and respond as new information is discovered.

However, we can also use global ticket data to get extra insight into our IT support process, improve our services, and help customers enjoy a better experience. So what have we learned so far?

 

Faster Responses

We’ve noticed some real advantages to customers connecting with us via the client portal – since last year, our average first-response time has improved by approximately 8%.

Evidence also suggests that in-life ticket responses are actually quicker via the portal than when raised by phone (around 5% on average), reflecting the fact that tickets can be updated without both agent and customer being available to continue the conversation at exactly the same moment.

So what does the time saving look like? In practical terms, it takes around 4 minutes longer for a simple phone call to be received, spoken and generated into a new ticket, rather than for that ticket to be submitted directly to the portal by the customer.

If most of those calls became portal tickets, Lineal customers and staff would save as much as 300 hours of talk time each and every year.

client portal

 

Changing Times

In previous years we’ve noted that Monday is our busiest day of the week, however recent data suggest this has shifted to Tuesday – possibly reflecting new hybrid working trends catching on, as office workers choose to reacclimatise to work from home either side of a weekend.

9am-10am remains overwhelmingly our busiest time of the day – as well as the period when a portal ticket can be created with the biggest time saving, compared with calling our Helpdesk.

 

client portal faster response times graph

 

High Importance

We took a gamble giving customers the ability to grade the priority of support tickets via the portal – we weren’t sure whether this tool would be used the way it was intended.

Statistics suggest it’s been an overwhelmingly positive feature – our highest priority tickets raised via the Client Portal (rated High and Urgent) have significantly faster first response times than not just tickets on average, but corresponding priority tickets raised by other methods.

 

Positive Feedback

Instant feedback (‘smiley face’) buttons added to the bottom of each ticket help users tell us more broadly how we’ve been doing. Ticket feedback for our IT Support service has been overwhelmingly positive (95%) and less than (5%) negative.

This is important because the feedback is gathered at time of writing, and on a rolling basis – rather than at times we’ve chosen to measure. Our current target is to increase this to 98% positive or greater.

 

For IT Support help and expertise, please contact our team today.