Another Customer Service Experiment

The next 12 to 18 months are going to be pretty exciting (and stressful) here at Blacknight.
A lot of things that have been in the pipeline should hopefully bear fruit and among other things both our staff and client numbers are growing all the time.

So one of the areas that I am particularly interested in tweaking is in relation to how we handle customer service and feedback.
At the moment we are setup to handle “normal” customer service issues ie. technical support or queries about our various services.
Sure, people can provide us with feedback in a variety of ways (if all else fails it’s not exactly rocket science to find my contact details!), but it’s not exactly smooth, either for the person submitting the feedback, or for us internally. We have tried a variety of internal ticketing and tracking systems, but staff are too busy actually resolving the issues a lot of the time to use those tools as effectively as I’d like.

This probably isn’t that much of a surprise to a lot of people.

When I started doing what eventually became Blacknight it was to design websites. Since I can’t design it soon morphed into hosting and domain registration (that was an afterthought). About 13 years later and the company is quite a different beast. Hosting and domain registration are our core business, but we’ve also been doing a lot of inhouse development work to both run the hosting and domain registration services more efficiently, but also to offer new services.
We’re currently working towards the launch of RSS.me, which has very little to do with domains or hosting (at least directly). Dropped.ie was nominated for an Irish Web Award last year and other services we’ve launched, such as GetPersonalWith.me have received international attention.

So, in short, we’re branching out to do a certain amount of software development, even if it is just to power our own services.

Which brings me back to the problem that I felt we had. The efficient handling of feedback, suggestions and all those other kinds of interactions that probably don’t fit too well into our main helpdesk.

So what are we doing?

Well one of the things that is great about being a smallish company is that we can experiment with new tools without having to deal with a lot of bureaucracy.
So with that in mind we’ve signed up to GetSatisfaction and have integrated it with our Facebook page. Hopefully we’ll be able to add the widget to a few of our sites in the coming days and then we’ll be able to see how well it works.
If it works well, both for us and for our clients and users, then we’ll keep it and possibly do even more with it. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll chalk it up to experience and move on.

So please do let us know what you think – either in the comments below, or via our GetSatisfaction community thingy