Regular visitors to our Facebook page have probably noticed that we have disabled messages on our Facebook page. The reason for this is that we were being overwhelmed with messages which was either taking us away from doing real work, or burying enquiries from genuine customers under the multitude of general messages. On analysis we found that around 95% of messages were people asking questions that were already covered in our FAQ's. So in a bold move we have disabled messaging on the Facebook page.
We have also moved responding to support requests received via email into the ticket system and dealing with them there. Support has always only been officially provided via the ticket system, but generally when we received a support request via email we would just answer it. This was also the same with Facebook, where we would answer support requests received by messenger. The outcome of this was that we had to provide support over several different channels, some of which were hard to monitor due to the abundance of other communications. So the move to only provide support via the ticket system will not only help us to monitor incoming support requests but also help us to provide a more efficient response to customers
Not needing to monitor Facebook messenger also has other benefits, the main one being that that there is no real need to go onto Facebook, which is pretty liberating. This frees up even more time which is no bad thing.
The move away from Social Media has forced us to take a look at our business systems. To ensure that it's the best that it can be we have moved our entire business system to a new provider so that we can amalgamate certain processes. These integrations help us to more efficiently manage customer relations and come with the added benefit of upgraded centrally managed software. This means that whilst it looks the same on the outside things like our website, the web store and our support portal are actually brand new. The integration of the web store into other systems is also much better. The old high-maintenance WooCommerce site has now been replaced by a commercial ecommerce system that takes care of everything from handling sales and shipping to taking phone calls.
So at the time of writing everything is being migrated across from the old setup and commissioned and tested. But by the time you read this, everything will be finished and working.
Feel free to let us know what you think.
