Call to Arms: Make customer support stats public

This isn’t the biggest launch we’ve ever done at Rippling. But it’s one of the scariest, for sure.

Starting today, Rippling is publicly publishing real-time metrics about our customer support. 

Many companies publish “status pages” showing downtime, incidents, and so on. This is a real-time “status page” for Rippling’s support quality and responsiveness.

Why is this scary?

Thanks to our incredible team, our metrics today, at the height of our busiest season, are really good. Over the last 90 days, our median response time was 51 seconds on average, and 34 seconds in the last week. But we’ve had blips in the past, and it’s inevitable that, sooner or later, we will have some bad days. If we fall behind responding to customers, it’s going to be there for the whole world to see—customers, prospective customers, and competitors.

So why are we doing it?

To the best of our knowledge, none of our competitors publish this data. But, we’re hoping that by taking this step, we can lead the way for the entire industry.

Support quality is an important consideration when choosing a system that’s as core to your business as Rippling is. We’re proud that customer ratings on G2 Crowd consistently rate Rippling’s support better than any other payroll and HR system, and also better than any other app and identity management system.

But without the actual data, customers are left guessing as to the support they’ll receive.

All of our competitors talk about the quality of their support. But talk is cheap. Rippling is the first company to prove it, with data.

And we aren’t just showing rosy averages—we’re also publishing 90th percentile response times, a far more punitive metric which shows you how long it takes us to respond in the worst 10% of cases.

We think this is the right thing for our customers and the right thing for our industry.

That’s why we are challenging our customers and prospective customers: the next time a company tells you they have great support, ask them for public, published support metrics such as these. 

And if they won’t provide it, that should tell you something. This is the only way we’re going to raise the bar for the support quality we all expect.