OpenReply

How we measure customer satisfaction with customer support - OpenReply

Amazing customer support is one of our top priorities. Even though you can find pretty good solution for collecting and evaluating feedback about customer support agents, most of them are provided as a service or are not open-source. We decided to fill this market gap with our partner Essential Data. We released our solution as OpenReply.

Probably the best known service of this kind is Slovak startup NiceReply. Even though we would like to use their service, our non-disclosure agreements with customers don’t allow us to give this kind of information to a third party. Because of this, we decided to program our own solution. It may be simpler than NiceReply (we have never actually tried their service), but we have it installed on our own server and thus we can guarantee that we deliver on our contractual promises made to some of our customers. If you have a similar problem, you can use OpenReply on your own server for free; it’s released under MIT License (which means OpenReply is open-source and free).

OpenReply is a simple CRM application, focusing on getting feedback about your employees from your customers. It also allows you to meaningfully review and evaluate the feedback given in a simple administrative interface. Out-of-the box, it integrates nicely with OTRS (Opensource Ticket Request System), one of the most widely used ticketing systems.

The application uses an URL inserted in the footer of each email, sent out from our ticketing system to our customers. This allows the customer to rate the employee answering to his or her request by simply clicking the URL in the footer. The application then offers a simple rating form, allowing him/her to rate the communication with the employee. We can then review the ratings collectively in a clean, user-friendly administrative interface offering various statistics and performance indicators. So, to summarize - the application is divided in two separate modules:

  • a public form used by your customers to rate an employee
  • an administration interface to evaluate and review the ratings given by your customers

As Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”  If your relationship with your customers is important to you - and if your employees communicate with your customers using e-mail - rating of replies is an important key performance indicator that will help your company improve quality of your service.

You can find OpenReply at https://github.com/essential-data/openreply

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