uTest.com is home to over 400,000 worldwide software/hardware testers. Our task was to find a way to decrease the amount of time Community Managers spent answering support tickets, while balancing the quality and timeliness of responses to uTesters.

Timeline

2 Months

With over 400,000 working professionals on a freelance website, you are bound to get questions from your community. This situation was no different. In the length of a day, our Community Management team could see up to a hundred support tickets submitted by uTesters.

The amount of time that Community Management was spending on support tickets was becoming unreasonable and changes needed to be made to make the process more efficient, saving Community Managers time and providing an overall better experience for uTesters.

The original system required uTesters to submit a support ticket by emailing Community Management via a generic support email address with no indication of what information would be required of them to answer their questions.

As you can imagine, this caused several problems for both uTesters and Community Managers. Here are a few problems that were haunting the team:

Being part of the Community Management Team myself, finding and gathering information regarding user’s (uTesters & Community Managers) behaviors was quick and simple. My team and I consolidated data regarding support tickets received such as the number of tickets submitted, what type of inquiry category the ticket resembled, and how long it took Community Managers resolve the support tickets.

Once consolidated, we were able to see the themes arising in most commonly submitted tickets.

There were several takeaways from this research, the most important being:

1. uTesters were frustrated with going back and forth with Community Managers just to provide them with basic information needed to get their questions answered.

2. Community Managers did not have extra time to put towards the increasing number of support tickets being submitted.

Proposed Solution

We were faced with constraints, one of which was our budget and system. Originally, the support ticket system was going to switch to the Zendesk platform but in the end (due to budgeting and the approval process) this was not a possibility.

Due to this setback, we needed to find a way to modify the process utilizing what tools were currently at our disposal.

In order to create a form that would satisfy the above solution, various internal teams came together to work through the various aspects including research, ideation, coding, and testing.

After working on this project, we were able to design an efficient, time saving support inquiry form that allowed for easy submissions of support inquiries, quicker support ticket resolution times, and a more user friendly experience.

New Process Flow

The goal of this project was to create an experience that was better for both parties, the Community Managers and uTesters.

Once the updated system was implemented, the number of spam emails and time spent trying to resolve a ticket were both dramatically decreased.

As a Community Manager, we wanted to find a solution for the uTester as quickly as possible, so they can spend more time what they are on uTest for: testing.

Good customer experience is key to increasing brand loyalty and creating brand ambassadors that share the positive experiences they’ve had to their communities.

On the Community Management side, the more efficient we can be in resolving issues, the more time we can focus on providing earn opportunities and content to the people that is the power behind our mission.