At Gusto, we believe the economy flows through payroll, making your advice to your clients critical to their success. To support small and growing businesses is strengthening feedback loops with you, enhancing our ongoing two-way dialogue. Our partnership is focused on giving you visibility into how we’re advancing our accountant experience while providing actionable advice that matters.
Overall Progress (last updated: 09/23/23)
We know how vital timely support is when needed. We are doubling down on this area to ensure you and your clients can get help on your terms and your timeline. We now support over 300k customers, and we’ve learned a thing or two along the way. We are innovating our service design at scale to support both online and offline needs. We heard your feedback and are evolving to better serve your customer service needs.
One important update we’ve made in the last nine (9) months is we shifted our customer support approach from a generalist model to one of specialized customer service. Here’s the positive impact of shifting to specialized customer service. As of August 2023, there’s been a:
65% year-over-year reduction in open tax resolution cases
62% decline in our average speed in answering the phone
37% year-over-year decrease in resolving general customer support cases
Our teams continue to focus on meaningful investments, improvements, and step changes, and we also know there’s a lot more to do. Let’s dive into how you can make the most of these (and other) improvements.
Need fast answers? Use ‘Search’ and the ‘Help Center.’ |
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Our rebuilt Help Center makes finding answers faster and more accessible than ever. With a new search engine and all-new articles and resources, we’ve got the answers you need to all your FAQs. We’ve also expanded the Search ability in your Gusto dashboard to include product features, help articles, blogs, and so much more.Finally – if you need more help from our Support team, type your question into the Help Center search bar. It will recommend the fastest channel (phone, chat, or email) to talk to someone and get your issue resolved as quickly as possible. |
In a time crunch? Use expanded Phone/Chat hours for faster care. (last updated: 09/23/23) |
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Use our phone/chat support for urgent and time-sensitive cases. Over the last three months, the phone wait time has averaged 3.5 minutes versus one (1) business day via email. If you’re a Silver and Gold partner, the average call wait time is three (3) minutes. We continue to expand our support team availability. We have extended our window by one (1) extra hour to 12 hours of support each workday versus our original 11 hours of daily care. Here are our newsupport hours by timezone:–PST Timezone: 5 AM to 5 PM, Monday through Friday.–MST Timezone: 6 AM to 6 AM, Monday through Friday.– CST Timezone: 7 AM to 7 AM, Monday through Friday.– EST Timezone: 8 AM to 8 AM, Monday through Friday. |
Need status updates? Check out our new Ticket Status features. |
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Payroll SupportYou no longer have to email, call, or chat with us to check on the status of your payroll support tickets. We have a new Ticket Manager feature that refreshes daily. Find it in the ‘Priority Support’ tab on the left-hand side of your Gusto dashboard. It provides payroll case visibility, showing if it’s still open, the subject of the support case itself, the assigned reference number, and any closed status updates. Tax Notice SupportA new, powerful Tax Accounts feature is available in your Gusto dashboard – under the Taxes & Compliance tab – and is being used by 6,000 customers. The feature allows you to view/sort state, agency, and tax types, review open or closed status updates, and guide you to take corrective action when changes occur. The best approach to tax notices is to prevent them in the first place. We have been making investments in automation that are starting to pay off, with tax cases decreasing by more than 70%. The benefit of this is that our tax specialists can invest more energy in handling complex and challenging issues. We are now seeing a dramatic decrease in open cases that take a month or more to resolve, and we expect this to continue. |
Need to filter messages? Update your notification settings. |
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We’ve revamped our Email and Notification Center. The updates allow you to focus on messages based on what you need or want to receive and select what types of emails you’d like to receive by category.Our principles around customer communications are simple: consistently delivering the right message at the right time in the right way and, most importantly, giving you the control you deserve.For example, you can select the ‘custom’ email option and, under ‘tax and compliance,’ choose ‘action required and critical emails to receive notifications that ensure the year’s last paycheck runs as smoothly as the first. This tactic will save time and keep you focused on valuable client services. |
Want to get better at Gusto? Take Payroll Certification. |
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Payroll compliance can be complex and sometimes difficult to understand, but with our recently launched Payroll Certification program, you can build foundational knowledge of the Gusto payroll process. You’ll learn how to create efficient workflows, master what to do in Gusto, and apply tips and tricks – from onboarding to offboarding and everything in between. Lastly, our two new electives can help you onboard new Gusto clients and support their growing remote teams: Hiring in a New State and Onboarding Clients to Gusto. |
We’ll continue to review your feedback and take action to best serve you, our valued accounting partners, and your clients. Please click here to complete a short survey and share your thoughts. Also, glance at other Gusto platform updates here.
With gratitude,
Will Lopez
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Will Lopez is Head Ambassador to accountant partners and customers at Gusto. Previously, he empowered accountants as Head of Community and Education. He has dedicated his career to supporting accounting professionals and small businesses with more than 20 years of public- and private-sector experience, including founding and building a modern, cloud-based accounting firm.
