OwnerRez help seems to be sliding downward lately

When OwnerRez help was basically just Ken, I was always amazed and appreciative at how quickly he'd respond. Now that there are more staff on the help team, I am experiencing replies to be more slow in coming as time goes by.

Example is that I am having a particular technical issue affecting functionality with my Airbnb account. I created a ticket about that in the morning two days ago.

This morning I got a reply to another help request that I made yesterday afternoon. The reply I got was to ask me who had responded to a previous related ticket that I had mentioned and when. I thought that was a strange question, but I replied to that and then asked if I could get a reply to the other ticket I made the day before that was more timely in nature, and I got no reply back.

I don't know any of the internal challenges to running a successful support team. I just hope I can get a response today to the ticket I created two days ago, and it would be fantastic if support could go back to being superior as it was in the not-so-distant past - one of the major selling points I have made to other hosts considering using OR.

The reason is very simple: we are getting more than 5x as much ticket traffic as we did back when it was just me, and, the other folks on the team are not yet as experienced and fast as I am.  On the other hand, they (intentionally) lean towards longer, more thorough replies, which naturally take longer.

Basically - we're growing the team as fast as we can, and also training and learning as quickly as possible, but the growth of the business is such that it is difficult to keep up.

Our objective is to answer all initial inquiries within a few hours, but as you rightly note, we are not currently meeting that standard.  Of course, Monday will always be by far the worst day for this, because we have to dig out from whatever's come in over the weekend.  We are working towards providing fuller weekend support, and ultimately 24/7, but that'll be a bit yet I expect.

Thanks, Ken. I suspected it had to do with as you describe.

I do wonder, however, why I got a reply (but not answer resolving the question) to a ticket I created yesterday afternoon, but not to my previous ticket created morning on the day before.

While we generally do try to answer tickets from oldest to newest, that's not a hard-and-fast rule, because, since we're growing the team and they are all at various different stages of knowledge, "newbies" are instructed to skip tickets they don't know how to handle, or ask for help when available, and continue moving down the list until they find one they do.  The more experienced people come behind to deal with the more complex ones, but naturally that takes more time.

For that reason, it is quite possible for a newer ticket to be answered before an older one, if for whatever reason whoever happened to be reading them could handle the one but not the other, or, needed to ask for help on the harder one.

I see. Thanks for that explanation. Makes sense.

I know you guys are doing your best!