Community backs up customer support

[Raul (Ann Onymuz)]

@adam

In the last week the number of new users have increased dramatically. This has put significant pressure on staff and generated a huge backlog of tickets for customer support.

The community forum has seen, due to this unprecedented spectacular and challenging increase in demand, a huge increase of new threads where new users come to ask for help.

Some of us older users take the initiative to contact some staff members to take a look and own the situation with success.

I personally find myself wondering who I should reach out to at a given time. The reason being my ignorance of who’s working at a given day. I don’t want to ask someone when that person is taking a well deserved sleep time.

I’m here to make a suggestion with the objective of leveraging the goodwill of the older users who’ve been trying to be supportive in directing staff members to those help requests that nowadays populate the forum, in order to help increase customer satisfaction.

Please send us a schedule of which staff member can we point to at a given day and between which hours. Makes sense?!

Example:

Tomorrow from 8.00 till 15.00 please point the post to:

@freetradeTeamMember1

@freetradeTeamMember2

Tomorrow from 15.00 to 23.00 please point the post to:

@freetradeTeamMember3

@freetradeTeamMember4

It might be beneficial to breakdown by subject:

Example

SIPP - point the post to:

@freetradeTeamMember5

@freetradeTeamMember6

Where’s my money:

@freetradeTeamMember7

@freetradeTeamMember8

No response on chat:

@freetradeTeamMember9

@freetradeTeamMember10

Stuck on creating account:

@freetradeTeamMember11

@freetradeTeamMember12

I believe this could be beneficial for Freetrade in several ways. First of all it can improve response time when addressing help requests on the forum. Also, staff would need to spend less time scanning the forum in order to find those help requests. We would scan it for you, as some of us have been doing, and would point it to the relevant staff member. This way staff can focus i solving the problem and spend less time surveying the forum to find a query. On another note, I believe the reputation of the forum could gain from the coordination of efforts between staff and users.

I’m happy to help. And, for what I’ve seen, many others have also been trying to help. But it is uncoordinated. I believe this would make it more efficient. Just DM us the schedule and we’ll do what we can with a smile.

I’m up to it.

My name is down

@Raul

[AdamL (Adam)]

Surely its easier to just have a @freetradesupport account that multiple users have access to?

[Wulfy]

Great idea. I think the way the community have helped over the last week has been incredible.

I agree a dedicated support channel is good, but would kind of still result in the same situation as in the app currently?

A way of filtering would allow the community to help direct the discussions too because the forum evolves in many ways. Threads are appearing at an astonishing rate and there are others who decide to ask a question or state a problem they’re having inside another thread, which might rake in hundreds of comments in any given week at the moment.

If there is such a way of helping to direct things a little better than at the very least some freetrade staff can save some time trawling. Which I’m sure they would want to do, but perhaps this can help, just in this time of madness.

[AdamL (Adam)]

I think as soon as they get through the backlog and hire a few new staff it’ll calm down . Then we can get back to what’s important, begging for user numbers and fanboying GGP.

[Freetrade_Team]

Hi @Raul, thanks so much for the idea — and everyone else, thanks for helping so many new forum members in recent days, weeks and indeed for a long time now

It’s hugely appreciated.

We’re working on some plans to revamp the forum a little and make categories simpler and to make it easier to find resources and help. We’ll also have someone new starting in the team to help.

For customer support, the best place to get help is still in-app chat— we can access all customer details there which we can’t do that here. We have a large team of temps starting to help us clear the backlog, so things will get back to normal soon. W’re also hiring across our Customer Ops team, let us know if you know anyone!

Careers

Stay tuned, and thanks again!