A tale of two teams: introducing Community Happiness and how we scale editor support
Find out how your experience as an editor is improving with a better support system (shameless plug: cat pictures included)
Here at Unbabel, we take pride in being a customer-centric company. By focusing on creating a positive experience for our clients, we’re able to develop our product offerings and build long-lasting relationships — and as with any kind of relationship, it takes time and effort to keep the bar high.
In fact, we do our best to extend this approach to our Unbabelers and also to editors and PROs in our Community. That’s why we’re often testing new features, for example, and often asking for our editors’ feedback. We aim to create a better platform and service, based on their needs.
With that in mind, we started brainstorming initiatives that could bring this “customer-centric” ethos to our community. Supporting our editors with all necessary resources and communication channels was such a crucial part of their experience at Unbabel, and we unanimously agreed it was about time to dedicate more attention to this area.
“We started brainstorming initiatives that could bring this ‘customer-centric’ ethos to our community”
On the other side of the (Zoom) room, the Customer Happiness team, as we formally call the technical experts at Unbabel, was discussing how they could scale their operations. They also wanted to support other legs of the business, not only our end customers. That’s how the idea of a support collaboration between Customer Happiness and Community teams came into life.
At our very first meeting, Diana (who was leading the project on CH’s side), Cahid and I agreed that transitioning part of the support from the Community to the Customer Happiness team would be a win-win situation for both teams and, most importantly, for our editors. At the end of that meeting, I said “Community Happiness” unintentionally — and it turned out to become the name of our joint team. After that, we knew it was (team) love at first sight.
In the third week of December, we handed over our support channel after six weeks of training and countless lines of documentation. It was definitely a challenge for us to put so many of the things we do on paper, and to train our colleagues on the community side of the business, but the team grasped the knowledge really fast and even helped us to improve some of the community management practices we already had in place.
If you’ve contacted us recently, you may have noticed a couple of new names at the bottom of our emails. Bruno, Octávio, Mauro, Pedro, Paulo and Ricardo have all worked as customer support agents in their "previous lives" before joining Unbabel. Their passion, vast knowledge and excellence have been crucial to shaping the interactions between clients, Unbabel — and now, our Community members.
“Bruno, Octávio, Mauro, Pedro, Paulo and Ricardo have all worked as customer support agents in their 'previous lives’”
However, I must confess there was this one thing that played a huge role in making this work: almost all of the Customer Happiness team members are cat owners. Needless to say, we extended our work capacity by adding those cute furry friends, which were always present in our virtual meetings and discussions.
Also, can we all agree that group pictures are soooo 2019? With that being said, let me introduce you to the team:
It’s been nearly two months since the Community Happiness takeover, and the results are already showing:
📈 75% of tickets sent by our Community were solved within 24 hours
📈 41% of these queries were answered in less than 8 hours.
Collaboration between teams is very important to keep learning different approaches and new ways to tackle challenges. That’s why we asked the team to compile some useful tips you could use the next time you message our support channels:
✨ How to be a supporter of Community support ✨
That’s kinda meta, we know…
- The knowledge base is your best friend!
First things first: check our Support Center — your question might have been answered, and it will be faster to search there instead of sending us an email. We’re always updating and adding more articles. - Don’t forget about our form
Use the support form, providing the email address you registered with at Unbabel. This makes it easier for us to sort your ticket based on your language pair and means we can help you as efficiently as possible. - Details are important!
The more information you can share, the better: links, screenshots, the time of the day you encountered a glitch on the platform… However, remember that those resources shouldn’t be shared anywhere else (not even on our Facebook group) and should be deleted after you send us a support request. - Separate your tickets per topic
Whenever there are different topics to report, don’t be afraid to send one email per subject (e.g. one message about evaluation and another one regarding cash-outs) — we have plenty of space in our support platform! - Basic troubleshooting really works
Clearing your browser’s cache and cookies, check the connection status, etc. might solve the issue you’re about to report. But in case it didn’t, let us know which steps you have tried.
