• Total support team of 70 reps

The majority of Flywheel’s support team are located in Omaha, Nebraska with a small amount in Europe and the rest in Australia.

Eric ensures that there is a full handover between each team at the end of every shift to ensure no ticket is left behind.

• Zendesk and Livechat are the two core tools

Eric and Flywheel’s two core tools are Zendesk for support tickets and Livechat for chat communication.

• How does Flywheel measure customer experience?

CSAT is a good, reactive real time feedback metric (though Ryan Steinberg tells us how it can be gamed in this interview) that Eric measures in both tickets and chats. There are two other metrics that Eric looks at a high level: “median ticket resolution time” and “chat queue wait time”. Eric looks at these metrics on a weekly, monthly and annual basis.

• Train and onboard effectively to ensure consistent customer experience

Eric and Flywheel create “team norms” whilst training and onboarding reps to drive a consistent customer experience across the time zones (our host Sid talks more about creating a consistent customer experience in this episode.)

• Flywheel only provide phone support to premium customers

Flywheel customers on lower price plans can only communicate with their support team through live chat. Premium customers receive phone support.

• Reducing chat wait time from 5 minutes to 11 seconds

Eric made small incremental changes to reduce chat wait time. For example, they looked at times with heaviest volume and ensured that more reps were working during those times. They were able to hit this goal with small workflow changes and an increased investment in training.

• Team leads are responsible for feeding back to the product team

There is a standing meeting between support team leads and product managers to give team leaders the higher level view, they can ask questions and give feedback about features that could be added to the roadmap.

They are encouraged to bring data to this meeting to give weight to their feedback e.g. “we received two hundred tickets this week related to this issue” instead of “we need to fix this issue”

• Flywheel’s support priorities for 2020

Flywheel will aim to provide help for their customers where they need it most… And it may not include people. E.g. if a customer is having an issue with directing their DNS, can they move through an automated workflow? 

As a support leader, Eric sees his core role is to make the lives of his support reps easier!