We have a dedicated server at HostGator and today while installing an SSL certificate for a customer Tom noticed they had upgraded their ticket support system. Then he saw this message:
- Customers can rate all HostGator responses. Your ratings will dictate how much an employee is paid and in turn improve quality.
- Employees are prevented from grabbing the easy tickets, AKA Cherry picking.
- Employees time is no longer wasted looking at spam and replying to spam to boost their ticket count. (spam no longer exists)
- We actually have reporting on EVERYTHING we need. Tickets abandoned, ratings, actions, etc.
- We can easily review responses and ratings to improve support.
- Dozens and Dozens of features that will speed up our lives DRASTICALLY which results in tickets getting answered quicker.
Wow! They actually pay their staff based on the ratings customers give them. Impressive! Typically bonus systems aren’t tied to any real metric in particular — just overall profits, or a big sale. But in this case, each employee can actually impact their paycheck.
2 responses to “Support the Gator Way”
But what if a customer starts taking advantage of staff, threatening to give a negative rating?
Plus now the priority becomes getting the customer to give you a good rating rather than solving their problem (I’m sure there will be times where the solution to both isn’t the same).
That said, it could all work really well. I guess they’ll see. 🙂
P.S. Didn’t Amazon try something like this once, where pay depended on how many calls you dealt with, so operators just started hanging up on people?
Well, HostGator is in the hosting and support business and they think it’s a good idea. So I’m going to just have to go with that.