Hi everyone,
Jamie from the support team here. I’d like to hopefully explain a little bit about response times. To address the elephant in the room, yes, response times are (on average) slower.
There are a couple of reasons for this, which, at the risk of sounding like I’m making excuses, I’d like to share.
The number of support tickets has grown YoY, but the size of the support team has not.
Fairly self-explanatory, but the numbers help frame it a bit. Last year, the support team (Chris and I) handled about 4600 tickets in 2017. So far, we’ve already had 4900 tickets and there are still 3 months until the end of 2018. The increased number of issues is mainly driven by more approval reviews, new programs that the support team manages, and engineering changes to the Marketplace. On average the total number of support issues grows 13% over last’s totals. If that sounds like an inhumane number of tickets for 2 people to handle, it is! (but a lot of that gets answered by automation) The support staffing efforts haven’t really kept pace with the increased demand. Good news - Ecosystem is hiring another support staff member. Meaning that tickets will likely see faster SLAs on average as the new person hits their stride.
Growing number of support managed programs
We’ve seen a lot of the complaints in this thread and a few others are about the response times for the PvA vendors’ free vendor license program (henceforth referred to as “the program”). I will fully admit that this one caught us off guard.
The program was originally created, developed, and maintained by a separate team whose sole responsibility was managing the program. As the ecosystem’s needs changed, we decided that the team responsible was better spent working on other projects. That left the program in limbo for a while until our team adopted it 3 months ago. My initial approach was that it shouldn’t be a priority until we can define how we would manage it and what we would need to automate. Again, the scope of the project caught me by surprise and it was left alone for longer than I planned. The good news is that we’ve committed resources to handling the existing issues and automating the support instances already in place. Expect to see more movement on those in the coming months. Sorry for the delay until now.
I’ve been focusing more on automation efforts to scale the support capabilities
If you haven’t seen my avatar poking around support issues for a while that’s because I’ve mostly been working on the team’s automation efforts to handle the most common support issues. As with the above project, I really think that once automation is in place it will relieve the burden on the support team and improve wait times on tickets. Some of the things we’ve automated this year - vendor refund requests, Bitbucket server datacenter pricing updates (dont ask -_-), GDPR right-to-be-forgotten requests, and now the free license program. This has improved SLAs for those issues, but it’s left the other queue work handled by 1.25 people. Big shoutout to @chparker who is holding it down while I work on other things. I’ve promised him that we will get to a better time where things feel more manageable (I feel strongly automation is key here!) but for now we’re both stretched thin and response times are longer than they should be.
There are other reasons why we’ve been slower than average (GDPR, team move to India, Summit/AtlasCamp) but I wanted to highlight the above because we rarely show the inside workings of the support team and this was a chance to address some of the major pain points that vendors experience (as well as ourselves.) I really hope it doesn’t come off as trying to make excuses. I only wanted to adhere to the Atlassian values (Open Company, No BS) so I hope that by being candid it helps frame some of the suffering you’ve been going through. Trust me, we’re not ignoring you out of maliciousness, we’re just learning to keep up with our growth. I appreciate your patience with us and I promise soon things will be moving quickly again.
Atlassian values it’s vendor relationships. If you have any follow-up questions for me or if one of your issues hasn’t gotten the attention it should have, please email me directly at jgaard@atlassian.com and I’ll happily take a look. As always you can reach us through the support queue by following the link here.