Next-Gen Support: Transforming Customer Experience with Speed and Precision

We’re pleased and quite excited to share that we’ve updated and enhanced our Customer Support function to solve for greater speed, transparency, and making deeper expertise available to you. 

While continuing to innovate to ensure that you, our customer, get top-quality and timely support for your queries and issues, the ongoing enhancement of our offering is highly dependent on YOUR input. 

Rest assured, we’ve heard and heeded your feedback on where we can bolster our Support function! We’re very happy to present the improvements we’ve made through process enhancement, team structure optimization, and the application of emerging technology, including AI. We’re excited about how this will expedite solutions for you as well as product enhancements for the future. 

And if you have any suggestions on how we can further improve, or you need any help, please reach out to me at vineet.s@darwinbox.com. By the way, that’s me, Vineet Singh, CTO and Co-founder at Darwinbox :). 

For the last 8 years, as the CTO, my focus has been building a world class HCM platform with a 400-strong Engineering and R&D team. Now, I am excited about the opportunity to elevate the value we deliver to you by applying innovation and technology to the Support function.  

Without further ado, let’s dive into it. 

What We’re Doing

In short, these are the combined outcomes of the several new initiatives we’ve taken, including advancements in HCM tech support, ensuring our systems are more responsive and efficient than ever before. 

1. Increased same-day resolution: We want to ensure that you get solutions to your issues in the same business day as far as possible. Following our Phase 1 changes, we've seen a significant transformation, with same-day resolution rates for L1 issues skyrocketing from 28% to over 70%. 
2. Enhanced solution content: We've elevated our documentation, focusing on the most common issues, and made it more accessible to you through intuitive tools. This ensures you have the right information at your fingertips when you need it. 
3. Transparency: You’ll always know where your solution is on its path to delivery in the new portal. 
4. Deep expertise: Our support team is now dedicated to specific modules, allowing them to become true subject matter experts with deep, specialized knowledge.

How We’re Doing It

We've heard your needs through surveys, interactions, events, and support tickets, and we’ve taken decisive action to deliver a truly transformative support experience.  

So, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. We've taken a three-pronged approach of process refinement, team structure optimization, and the application of emerging technologies, including AI. What do these mean for you? 

Optimizing Teams and Refining Processes for Superior HCM Support 

Let’s take the first two aspects of this transformation together. 

1. Ask Darwin Team is reorganized to mirror the Engineering Team 
   Our Engineering and Ask Darwin teams are now strategically aligned, with Ask Darwin members dedicated to specific modules rather than being spread across our entire product suite. By mirroring our engineering structure, the Ask Darwin team has transitioned from generalists to specialized experts, creating tightly integrated module 'verticals' across both departments for a more cohesive and expert-driven HCM support experience. 
2. Ask Darwin experts now specialize by module 
   As explained above, our Ask Darwin experts focus on specific modules, deepening their expertise and mastery of the issues and solutions within their assigned areas. This approach not only enhances their ability to provide top-tier support but also accelerates module improvements by effectively tracking recurring issues in each module and prioritizing them on the product roadmap. 
3. Multiple shifts across time zones 
   Our customers are spread across geographies. So, we’ve staggered our shifts to ensure that we're available to support you during your working hours, no matter where you are. This increases our ability to give you real-time responses. 
4. Mastered triage model:
   Under our new SLA model, we've implemented a robust 3-layer system. Each layer is handled by a dedicated team with its own SLA. If an issue isn't resolved within one team's SLA, it escalates immediately to the next. 
   
   L1: Handles basic and direct queries. 
   L2: Tackles complex issues and unblocks customers. 
   L3: Comprised of QA experts, this team addresses issues requiring coding or engineering involvement.
    
   As a result of these changes, we’re seeing significant improvements in our Support process. Our day-to-day operations now run without a backlog, and our robust solutioning system ensures that less than 5% of issues reach the L3 level (requiring Engineering intervention). Our L1 and L2 teams ensure all tickets received during business hours are addressed the same day.  

Technical solutions

The third aspect of the Support revamp involves the use of tools and other solutions. 

1. Ask Darwin portal is now accessible directly on Darwinbox 
   Simple but effective—you no longer need to log in to a separate Ask Darwin portal. Now, it can be accessed from their Darwinbox menu itself. While keeping them separate made sense in Ask Darwin’s initial days, it is most optimal when it is accessible within the flow of your work. Darwinbox has been your one-stop shop for everything HR. From the same place, you can now escalate issues with a single click and close tickets at your end based on your satisfaction. 
2. Darwinbox Sense AI suggests solutions from our documentation 
   We have created nearly 1700 articles detailing solutions based on frequently raised tickets. Now when you raise a ticket, Darwinbox Sense AI will parse through the documentation and provide a summary solution if one has already been created for that issue. We're seeing around 40% of issues get solved at this stage itself, eliminating the need for a ticket. This expedites your solution, while keeping the Ask Darwin team’s bandwidth free for more complex tickets.
   
3. Compliant Issue Recorder tool for Easy Resolution 
   We’ve integrated a tool where you have the option to make a screen and audio recording of your issue while raising a ticket. It is completely compliant with infosec requirements, and you can even mask sensitive data. This visual reference will help reduce or eliminate a lot of back-and-forth clarification, making your ticketing process easier and expediting your issue resolution.  
4. Instant Feedback on Support 
   You can now share feedback for your ticket resolution experience directly on the portal. This enables our team to analyze inputs and take targeted corrective actions. 
5. Secure access to troubleshoot via Neo User Login 
   We now have an easier and more secure way to gain access to the backend of customer instances. Instead of sharing credentials, we can create a “Neo User” with prior intimation/permission from the customer, giving us access for troubleshooting for a short period. The entire Neo User activity is logged in the audit trail, and a video recording is made for compliance. 
6. Implementing more self-sufficiency measures 
   Our Support Team is dedicated to making you self-sufficient by identifying and automating areas that previously required our intervention. We've implemented 39 enhancements so far, empowering you to manage tasks independently. For example, you can now revoke a custom flow directly from the Darwinbox app, eliminating the need to submit a support ticket. This enhancement alone addressed 6% of our total tickets, bringing resolution time down to zero. 

Future outlook

In the days to come, we aim to double down on Sense AI to create even more effective tools for our customers to get better solutions, faster.  For example, imagine admin-level walkthroughs that are created on the fly for how-to queries. Presently, you might be redirected to some documentation; in time, we would like to provide AI-created, just-in-time tours to take you step by step through what you need to do. 

But that’s not all. Here’s a quick look at a few more of the Support enhancements we have in the works that you can look forward to soon. 

• Integrations-monitoring page in the Support portal: This will monitor for breakages in an integration and can rerun the integration.  

• AI-powered issue identification: This AI bot will be able to detect what might be causing a particular issue based on settings in the backend, so that a contextual solution can be recommended.

• Access control in your hands: You’ll be able to easily add or remove support access to your admins on your own, without having to reach out to our team. 

• Self-serve Support Analytics: We’re working on a dashboard for you featuring analytics on the support tickets created, resolution TAT, and query analysis.  

• Data quality dashboard: This dashboard will help you to proactively identify any sanity issues in data setup/management for correction. 

And this is just the beginning! As we get more data on issues and AI gets smarter, there’s no telling what we can build. As always, our goal will be to provide top-quality and timely support, ensuring that you, our customers, are always set up to deliver a stellar employee experience to your people.