If we've had the pleasure of assisting you in LiveChat recently, it is likely that you've noticed a few changes therein. One of which is a Chat Verification System, designed for you to conveniently and securely verify yourself as the account owner.
Account verification has always been taken very seriously by us, but has unfortunately often been experienced as an inconvenience by our Customers. There is now a small button at the lower right-hand corner of the chat window that says "Verify Acct." You may click this at any time in order to automatically provide your billing account credentials and thus verify yourself as the account owner. Conversely, if the chat conversation reaches a point such that account verification is required in order to continue, the Jr. Administrator handling the chat has a similar button on their end which will then request you provide verification credentials in order to continue with the chat.
Moving forward, we will be expanding this to include additional forms of verification as well. As it stands, approximately 25% of chats are auto-verifying via this utility, resulting in overall shorter chat times and increased security. As we expand the functionality of this tool, we look forward to serving you faster and more securely than ever before.
Ticket Submission Form:
Earlier this month, we silently launched our new support ticket submission form; visible by clicking on "Create a Ticket" at http://support.hostgator.com. This form is designed not only for ease of use, but also to greatly reduce the amount of time involved in resolving any given issue. Traditionally, if you emailed us directly for support and neglected to provide account verification information, then we often had no choice but to reply back requesting said information. This extra step, though absolutely necessary, could add hours onto the total resolution time for any given issue. The new form takes care of this vital step right up front, ensuring that each request for support that we receive does come from the actual owner of the specified account.
Another great thing about the form is that it ensures each request lands in the correct queue from the outset. In the past, if you happened to email support@hostgator.com with a request to migrate your data to another hosting plan, that ticket would wait in the support queue and then when it reaches a Support Admin, that Admin would have to change the queue of the ticket over to Migrations where the ticket would then await a Migrations Admin to work on it. Now, this form ensures not only that the request is verified, but also that it appears in the absolute correct queue. These two improvements, combined, will drastically improve our response time to your support requests.
Since the form launched, around 9am CST on Friday, June 9th we have received 1027 tickets. Of those, 956 were already verified before hitting the queue. That's almost 1,000 requests within just five days that didn't require any additional time or responses due to lack of verification. In other words, 94% of the requests we received for support this week were pre-verified and in the correct queues. Clearly, this form is going to streamline our ability to assist you more efficiently.
We hope you enjoy these new features and find them as fundamentally use-able as they were designed to be. If you experience any troubles with these, or anything pertaining to your HostGator account, you can always email feedback@hostgator.com and we will be happy to assist you.
HostGator's blog is ALIVE!
If you haven't stopped by http://blog.hostgator.com lately, please do! The blog is alive and well these days, and we're having a lot of fun with it! You can read about our recent adventures with possums in our new building and see some of the hilariously bad fake IDs that we receive on a regular basis from fraudulent sign-ups. Some up-coming posts include our observations of the 2012 Transit of Venus and a special post sharing some of the ridiculous and amazing art that is displayed around the HostGator offices. Expect a new post each and every week!
Some Numbers:
Our Support statistics for the month of May, 2012 are as follows:
142,159 Chats
76,409 Calls
179,990 Tickets
Until next month! Remember: We Are Hiring