Re-enable reminders for pending tickets, reduce pending days, increase solved days

Problem Statement

What is the problem?

  1. Zendesk tickets currently stay Pending for 20 days (if a customer doesn't reply) before automatically changing to Solved.
  2. They then automatically change from Solved to Closed after 7 days if we don't hear from the customer again.
  3. Customers do not receive any automated messages during this period.

Note: 'days' on this issue refers to 'calendar days' not 'business days'.

Why is this a problem?

  1. Poor customer experience:
    1. Customers may not get any notification or reminder that we're waiting on a reply from them until the ticket is auto solved. If they miss our first reply they don't know we're waiting to hear from them.
    2. Customers will get a satisfaction survey after the ticket changes to solved. This can be 20 days after they last heard from us. This is too long to be able to give accurate feedback about the ticket.
  2. Poor support engineer experience:
    1. A lot of tickets build up in the 'My assigned tickets view' that are 'Pending'. This adds mental overhead to managing case load.
    2. Manual reminders need to be sent at regular intervals asking if this customer received our previous reply and letting them know we're waiting to hear from them. This isn't a good use of support engineer time

Context

I have searched (with Jason's help) for issues discussing why we changed to '20 days pending' and why we removed the automatic follow up reminders. We have not been able to find any issues and believe that these changes were made without change management discussion.

My understanding is that the reason for the increase to 20 day maximum pending time is to allow for scenarios where the customer needs more time to get back to us. However we do now have a way to extend this manually by adding the skip_autosolve tag (handbook).

Side note: Zendesk has built in limit of 28 days before a ticket moves to a 'closed' state so our workflows need to be aware of that.

I believe that the reason we removed the 'automatic reminders for pending tickets' was that we had some complaints from customers saying they didn't like them. Since there was no issue discussing this we don't have data on how many complaints we had or if there were other approaches we could take (such as rewriting the reminder to make it more effective / friendly). Experience tells me that a well written automatic reminder should be good for the customer experience and my sense is that a very small percentage of people complained about them.

Proposal

  1. Reduce the maximum time a ticket can stay in Pending without a reply from the customer from 20 calendar days to 7 calendar days.
  2. Increase the time a ticket stays in the Solved state to 20 days before moving to Closed
  3. Reinstate automatic reminders during the 7 day Pending state (suggest two reminders, one at 2 days and one at 4 days)

These changes would solve the problems listed above. Customers can still reopen a ticket up 27 days from their last reply simply by replying to the ticket. We can use something similar to the skip_autosolve tag workflow for when a customer requests we leave the ticket pending for an extended period.

DRI

@tatkins will act as DRI for this until a decision has been reached. Then @jcolyer will be DRI for implementation if needed.

Required Resources

  1. Support ops to update Zendesk settings.
  2. The content of the automatic reminders needs to be written - if this proposal gets approval in principle we can work on that text in this issue.

Potential Roadblocks/Things to consider

Zendesk Explore reports will need to be updated and the effect on metrics considered. @Ikosenko can comment on this.

Desired Outcome

What does success look like?

  1. Customers are automatically kept aware that we're waiting to hear back from them
  2. Customers receive a satisfaction survey close to the date when they were active on their ticket
  3. Support engineers do less repetitive work
  4. Support engineers find it easier to manage their case load

How do we measure success?

  1. Customer satisfaction stays the same or is not reduced
  2. We could survey support engineers to check that they prefer the new system when it's running (that said, this is a return to something similar to the original system that was changed without wide consultation so our criteria for success doesn't need to be too stringent)

Where would future feedback go?

Future feedback regarding this issue should likely have a new issue created (with this one linked to them) so it can be discussed and rectified via support-ops.

cc @gitlab-com/support/managers for discussion this week in our sync calls.

Edited by Tom Atkins