Situation
FutureLearn has been through a sudden and immense scaling during 2020, and the customer support team struggled with the workload. There were only 4 team members, including myself, when we suddenly started getting 500% increase in emails due to the high demand for online learning. It caused severe delays in getting back to the customers. Customer support team also took on the brunt of partnership and business enquiries, as many people simply used the web Help widget for contact instead of filling out the specific forms for partnership and business development enquiries.
FutureLearn numbers
"Before March 2020, our free educational website was typically attracting 40,000 visitors a day. That number just went up and up in March, hitting 50,000 by the third week in March, then 90,000 and then up to 200,000 visitors a day. Those numbers continued throughout the spring and summer."
*The Open University is FutureLearn's partner and Open Learn is one of FutureLearn's competitors
Task
Offer quicker support to the customers, reduce workload for the team, and enable easier delivery of the products. Direct B2B enquiries to the relevant team.
Action
I have suggested the following actions to the Head of the Community team and the team agreed to them:
- Triaging tickets - setting up a twice-daily triage rota amongst the team members so we could identify the more urgent issues as well as assign priority levels and tags/keywords so we could identify them more easily for bulk response and prioritisation. It also allowed us to identify partnership and business opportunities to pass on to the relevant teams
- Make the web Help widget several levels deep. Up until then, users were able to email support directly via the web widget.
- Automate certain time-consuming tasks, such as the Invoice request form or B2B enquiries
- Bulk process QA and issue reports
Result
- Making the direct contact form (web widget) several levels deep, it allowed learners to attempt self-help first, by going through the Help section/Knowledge base. Before that was put in place, we used a 'Super macro' response for one of the most commonly asked about topics, 'certificates', which offered a FAQ allowing learners to self-help and for us to bulk reply to multiple users.
- Identifying tickets via keywords and tags and bulk replying using macros - a bit impersonal but it at least offered a solution to 70-80% of the learners.
- Automations and forms allowed for auto-population of the data which went to the relevant teams, which resulted in faster processing and delivery of requests
- Instead of reporting each QA issue (typo, broken link etc) to the editorial assistants using Trello board or Slack, we would tag such tickets with a 'qa' tag and then download all the tickets on a weekly basis and pass them on to the Editorial assistants (after removing personal learner data from it)
