Polo strengthens customer support, resolves more than 100k tickets in one year
Many of you remember the Spring of 2018: crypto was falling, the viability of blockchain technology was being questioned, and Circle had just finished the acquisition of Poloniex.
Things were uncertain, including the reliability of our customer support. But today the story is different. Crypto is on the rise, blockchain networks continue to evolve rapidly, and our customer support has been completely transformed. So we would like to take you on a multi-part journey to share the investments and improvements we have made for our greatest asset — you, the customer.
When Circle acquired Poloniex, we inherited a number of infrastructure, interface and customer support inadequacies that needed to be brought up to our standards. This included an outstanding customer ticket backlog in excess of 140,000, where customers had been waiting weeks, or even months, to receive updates to their inquiries. That kind of Customer Support is fundamentally misaligned with our philosophy, and we immediately set out to make it right.
In this first of four updates to our Customer Support improvements, we will share how we have upgraded our response and resolution times. Other updates will include scaling, technology, and customer satisfaction improvements. We hope this information, and the subsequent three updates, give you the highest confidence in our platform, and our team. We have made mistakes in the past, there is no denying that, but we are fixing them, and we hope you give us the chance to keep proving why our platform is so valuable.
The Journey
Looking back one year to April 2018, we inherited a backlog of 140,000 open customer support tickets. Today, we have resolved 99.9% of those tickets, with the remaining to be completed in June 2019.
Number of open support tickets by month
As you can imagine, a backlog of tickets this size led to unacceptably long response and resolution times. Most of these tickets were basic requests from customers when they needed to reset their Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) or verify their account. But some were stubbornly complex, like cases when a customer passes away, leading us to determine how we securely verify the person making the claim is the rightful owner to those funds. As such, the backlog took time, and cross collaboration among internal Circle teams, to resolve. That regretful level of service eroded our credibility in the market, damaged our brand and left our customers questioning our platform. So we set out to right the ship.
To start, we evaluated our ticket routing system and made drastic improvements to how we received, assigned and distributed customer inquiries. Instead of tickets flowing into multiple queues, we centralized everything, then created highly efficient routing protocols to optimize which team, and which specialist, received the inquiry. For example, requests to disable or reset 2FA are now prioritized and routed to a team member in the right geography who can handle the request without an escalation or hand-off. And when you submit a critical request to investigate a possible account hack or takeover, we analyze that request, ship it directly to a Risk Specialist and get you the answer you need much quicker.
Second, we focused on improving the flow of difficult tickets that required deep investigation by our Engineers, Legal or Compliance departments. We started by establishing cross-functional Task forces to analyze the current state and design the optimal future state, then built stories, epics and projects to bridge the gaps. Protocols were evaluated, processes streamlined and decision makers crowned. The result is faster, accurate, more consistent responses and resolution times for our customers. As you can see in the chart below, we improved the percentage of inquiries responded to in less than 12 hours from 25% to 95% and improved the percentage of inquiries resolved in less than 4 days from 35% to 78%. That’s progress.
First response and resolution times by month
Of course, there is still significant room for improvement. We REALLY want to respond to your inquiries faster, offer you more channels to submit your inquiries, improve our self-service and automation capabilities, expand our geographical reach, gather your feedback for improvements, and so much more. Over the next few months we commit to expanding our Hong Kong team, launching a new premium support program for our VIP customers and testing new channels to support faster and more efficient resolution of your questions.
Overall, it’s a good start, but just that, a start. We first wanted to admit our prior shortcomings, so next we can commit to improving and providing a new level of transparency to you, our customers.
So if you are already a customer, thanks for being loyal. If you were once a customer, maybe come back and give us another shot. We would love to welcome you back to the Poloniex and Circle families.
