Community Tip: How to improve feedback loops with automated peer reviews

On the BetterCloud Support team, our mission is to always strive to delight. This experience starts and ends with support and is the reason we constantly look to not only innovate in the support space, but also continually learn and grow as a team.

Problem

Providing direct feedback to other people on your team is tough, especially when that feedback is critical, and initially, our team found it difficult to provide or receive feedback directly to each other. Sure, when we receive a good or bad review from a customer, that’s easy. But rather than waiting for customers to call out anything that we can improve on, we want to identify those opportunities ourselves first. We needed to improve customer feedback loops.

Solution

To combat this, we have created a Zendesk Peer Review system. It’s an automated process that allows you to automatically (and randomly) assign solved tickets for anonymous peer review using Google Sheets, Google Apps Script, and the Zendesk API. At the beginning of each week the system gathers the solved tickets from the previous week for a specific group of agents and assigns those tickets to a set of reviewers. The group of reviewers can contain anyone you’d like — we even have our CEO reviewing a few tickets every week. Once the feedback form has been filled out and submitted it is automatically sent to the agent of the ticket.

The steps we followed were:

1. Make a copy of the Peer Review System Template.

2. Set script variables in the Dashboard tab

3. Set up Reviewers tab

4. Set up Agents tag

5. Set up the script

Results

As a result of this rapid feedback loop, we’ve found:

• areas our team need additional training or education on

• it has helped us identify top performers

• the process serves as a great way to spread ‘tribal’ knowledge

• it has proven to be very helpful during the onboarding process for new hires

• it allows managers to mention small/nitpicky/overlooked items that otherwise wouldn’t have been caught

• agents feel a larger sense of pride in their tickets if they know the ticket may potentially be reviewed

Community Tip is from Michael Stone, Director of Technical Support, BetterCloud.