Deep Dive Into The World of Derivita Support

The Support Process:

As soon as a support request is issued with an email, voicemail, or filled form, our Support Team receives a new support ticket. A member of the Support Team will go through it, label it with a priority level, tag the best team member to tackle the issue, and give it a name that summarizes the request. Andrew details, “based on the priority, the age of the ticket, who is available, and what skills are required, someone will pick up the ticket and assign it to themselves” and will respond shortly.

Next is the meat of the process and also where it varies based on the type of request received. A support ticket can require a screen share, labeled screenshots, detailed instructions, or continued correspondence. This also means that this step in the process can take different amounts of time for each request and user. “We are very fast,” Andrew admits and adds “We’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of resources and good tools, so we’re very fast… a real person will read your request and you can usually get a response from a person within a day”. 

A ticket isn’t considered closed until our Support Team receives a response from the user to ensure that “everything is okay” and they are able to accomplish what they need to within the platform. He adds, “A big part of closing a ticket is the internal ‘to-do’s’ that come with it”, this includes passing on customer feedback, reporting a bug, or making a content and/ or feature request. 

If the reported issue is seemingly affecting more teachers than just the one user who sent in the request, our Support Team will reach out to those other teachers to ensure they are not experiencing similar difficulties. 

The Support Tickets:

While our Support Team receives support requests that come in all shapes and sizes, one of the more common types of requests starts with the phrase “How do I do…”. This type of question comprises about one in five support tickets. Also common are questions about where to find questions about a particular topic in the Derivita Math Question Bank. 

Customers’ requests are often escalated to our Product Team or our Content Team and added to our pipeline. We regularly add new features and questions based on customers’ feedback.

The Fall, back-to-school season is the busiest time of the year for our Support Team, with plenty of “How do I get set up?” or “Is it possible to do this with Derivita?” questions coming in. Most of the Derivita support requests come in from teachers; less than 10% of tickets are sent directly by students and only 5% come from IT specialists or administrators. Andrew remarks “We get very few emails for the number of customers we have. Given that we have tens of thousands of users, the fact that our team considers it a busy week when more than 30 of them get in touch is a testament to how easy it is to use Derivita”. Those are pretty impressive numbers in the grand scheme of not just software customer support but customer support in general. 

The Best Bits:

As a “teeny-tiny” team, Derivita’s Customer Support team has the ability to discuss questions and processes that arise in detail and without formality, which allows them to “move really fast and change processes” as needed. They also have the opportunity to work with all the other departments in Derivita. This includes talking to “the engineers about a bug, the Product Team for a feature request, the Sales Team about how to train new customers, Partner Success about which customers may need more assistance, and the Content Team about our questions”. This is one of Andrew's favorite aspects about working on the Support Team and something he considers a “great privilege”.

He adds that another one of his favorite parts is that our Support Team “gets to make people happy all day. There is something special about actually talking to people who use Derivita, who tell you how useful it is and the size of the difference the product makes''. Andrew concludes, “We can’t fix everything all the time, but we do everything in our power to make things easy for our customers, and seeing their relief and gratitude makes it well worth it!”

Thank you to Andrew and his team for everything they do and their efforts to make sure every one of our users has a smooth and positive experience with Derivita!