My name is Ethan Stanislawski and I lead the Customer Success team at LexBlog. I’m thrilled that LexBlog has launched 99 Park Row, as it allows us to share the knowledge and experience we have in the world of legal blogging. A huge part of that comes from providing a top-notch customer experience when guiding our customers at all stages of their ventures into blogging. From signing the contract through getting the blog launched to any issues that arise while blogging, we support our clients at every step of the way. To help illuminate that, here’s an overview of what a typical day in the Success team consists of, inasmuch as there ever is a “typical day.”
Check Email
Although email isn’t our primary method of communicating with customers, I, like many others, always check my email first thing in the morning. My inbox consists of a mix of more urgent customer tickets, company updates and emails from blogs I subscribe to—including our founder Kevin’s and Above The Law’s Daily Newsletter.
I also receive weekly analytics reports for our ticket volume (more on that later). In terms of stats, our team can receive between 60-120 tickets in any given week, not including back and forth communications on ongoing projects or tickets involving membership intake to our Portals. Our internal Service Level Agreement (SLA) for response time is four hours for normal tickets, three hours for tickets marked “High” priority, and two hours for tickets marked “Urgent.” We meet our SLAs over 85% of the time on average, but I’m not happy unless it’s over 90%.
Zendesk Tickets
We use Zendesk as our primary platform for communicating with clients. We manage these communications with two main views in Zendesk: General Support Requests (GSR) and Projects. GSR consists of all issues from blogs that are already live. This can range from adding users, issues with formatting posts, issues with post imagery or email notification issues. A lot of times, these issues involve educating our clients on available functionality. If a legitimate issue on our platform is exposed, we’ll usually follow up with our developers. We’ll also often get feature requests, which we always consider based on demand, user needs and the long-term vision of LexBlog’s product.
The Projects view is a whole different animal. These consist of blogs that are in transition between the contract being signed and getting launched. On our Boutique and Full Service plans, we often have a back and forth on design options—making sure posts, pages and blog footers are all updated ahead of time.
Launch Day
After blog designs have been approved, posts have been added and pages have been updated, it’s the big day! We take a blog from it’s pre-live site to a fully indexed blog syndicated on LexBlog.com, Coronavirus Legal Daily and any other of our firm specific portals. This involves thorough QA on the front end, some back end SEO configuration, adding to Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and more. We generally schedule no more than seven spots for launches per week. This process will be changing significantly in the future. More on this to come.
Team Meetings
In addition to our periodic meetings about any other number of product updates, business strategies and future endeavors that we’re involved in for LexBlog operations as a whole, our team meets twice a week to discuss issues affecting our team. These include both internal issues—breaks, assignments of launches, coverage of emails, phones and chat)—as well as organization updates from our other teams.
Phones/Chat
We offer phone support from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time on Mondays through Fridays, as well as chat support to clients using our Premier and Full Service products. In addition to receiving calls as they come in, we also reach out to customers via phone for more complicated situations that would be better talked through.
This is of course, an oversimplification, as any day can bring on a number of new challenges, and communication within our team and with our teams is a major point of emphasis. Our process is always evolving, but the point of emphasis remains the same: serving our clients with exceptional support and experience throughout their blogging journey.