Learn to be a customer support pro.
I got this in the mail the other day. Since I fly every now and then for work, I signed up for the Southwest rewards club. They’ve got my birthday in some huge database that automatically sends these out. But that’s okay. I know someone at Southwest came up with the idea and worked to make sure all their rewards customers get a birthday card. It’s a pleasant surprise that adds to the overall experience with them.
They even “signed” the inside!
The other Chase is leading the charge on customer support app reviews but I wanted to chime in with the one on Desk since I use it every day. Free app trials gives you a chance to check it out but using it day in and day out for two years gives me time to take a deep look at it.
Desk has a ton of features but I’ll only focus on the ones our team uses everyday. And like with all big choices, a pros and cons list helps out. So here’s my pros and cons of working with Desk.
The universal inbox is great. Twitter, Facebook, email, chat, and phone cases all appear in one single inbox for reps to work from. No digging through Twitter searches or installing other apps for chatting. Everything’s in one place.
Case management is solid. With all those in one inbox, having a good system to manage the cases is critical. Each interaction with a customer becomes a case. Cases can be transferred between agents to get second opinions. You can leave notes on them to ask questions from other team members. And each case tracks a history so you can see previous interactions with the customer. Everything you need for that customer is in one place.
The mobile app is good. While most of my work happens at my desk, there are definitely times when I want to check in from my iPhone. I might be on a road trip or just out for the day. But I don’t want my customers to sit waiting for an answer for me. Desk has apps for all the major players (iOS, Android, Windows phone, and even BlackBerry). It’s easy to use and lets me check in on my cases when I’m away from the desk.
The Twitter tool is pretty slow. Desk pulls each Tweet in as its own case. But pulling those in, opening them, and responding can be pretty slow. It gets the job done but when you’re aiming for fast support, it can be frustrating. We actually don’t use it anymore in favor of a custom-built Twitter tool.
Contacting Desk support can be kinda confusing at first. They do have a central support site, with links to the right email/phone/Twitter channels. But they’ve got three separate Twitter channels – @desk / @desk_ops / @desk_support. When their app goes down (or any app really), the first place I check is their Twitter handle. I love Twitter support and always go there first. But with Desk, I don’t really know which one to tweet at and such.
Good news though – they’re getting way better at the support side. They’ve made huge strides in the past few months.
Searching through cases is pretty rough. If I know that this email address contacted us, that’s an easy search. But anything beyond that gets complicated and often results in me just giving up on the search tool. Google’s spoiled me in that regard and I know first hand how tough getting a search tool right is. But I’ve still gotta put that in the con column.
At the end of the day, I’m okay with Desk. Like with any app, I get frustrated with it at times. But it does the job our team needs it to do – answer customer emails fast. And as long as it can do that, I’m good with it.
This is part of the Customer Support App Review series. Read more articles in the series.
In my last review, I covered Tender and how it seems perfect for a small startup or other company looking to move from simple email support to a more robust ticket tracking solution. Now we’re going to take a look at Desk which is not only geared towards tracking tickets, but towards helping a large support team support an even larger user base.
Desk is made by the very successful folks behind Salesforce, a well-known CRM tool. Desk goes beyond emails and tracking tickets, it allows for social media integration, live chat, and even phone support. It’s no wonder then that companies like DirecTV, Square, Vimeo, and many others turn to Desk for their support app.
Another attractive feature is the mobile apps that Desk offers, allowing agents to stay on top of the support queue no matter where they are. Apps are available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry.
As with most of the other tools I’ll review, customization is pretty simple, allowing for custom domain names, style selection, and the like. Desk also offers integrations with many other services your company might already be using, so tying into those is a breeze.
Pricing’s straight forward. The first agent is entirely free – no catches. Then, you can add other agents in at $49/month/agent. Or, you can go the “flex agent” route. That lets anyone use Desk for $1/hour/agent. It’s a great setup for adding in full-time support reps but still letting the rest of your team answer an email here and there without paying for another full-time agent.
In the end, we did not go with Desk for our support app. But it was definitely a contender. It is well worth a look if you need some of the very advanced features it offers, and is priced competitively as well.
This is part of the Customer Support App Review series. Read more articles in the series.
Every week, there’s some great articles out there on customer support and the overall customer experience. Most of us working on support teams tend to be busy helping customers so we don’t have a chance to go scouring the web for them.
To fix that, I’ve got a brand new section of the Support Ops site with the customer support roundup. Each weekend, our team here will make sure you’ve got the best articles from the past week. Weekends are perfect for reading so it’s a good chance to see what might have been missed in the past week.
If you’ve got any articles or links that we’ve missed, make sure to let us know in the comments.
Grab that cup of coffee and dig in!
We’re back from winter break with Sarah Stealey on this episode. She talks about consulting with companies to train their customer contact teams. It’s not just about keeping customers happy, it’s about keeping teams happy too.
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If you have an idea for an episode you would like to see or a question, e-mail me.
Oh, and if you enjoyed the show, please rate it on iTunes. That’d go a long ways in getting the word out. Plus, you’d get cool points.
Great customer support comes down to three things – it’s got to be clear, concise, and fast. With this post, I want to push the necessity of a fast response.
Many companies promise replies with a business day or two, which provides for a crappy experience. I remember being locked out of an app for close to thirty hours. Since it was a non-essential app, it wasn’t a horrible experience overall. But if that had been a product essential to my business, that would’ve been unacceptable.
Your speed of response shows your customers your commitment level to them.
If you’re replying to customers that have been waiting for two days, you’re not invested in them. They’re just a number, another email, something to get out of the way before you can go home for the day. In return, they’ll see you as a required vendor they have to use because there’s no other option. You’re the Wal-Mart in town they buy from because all the other grocery stores are gone.
But replies within a few minutes, that changes everything. It shows your committed to helping them. That you’re a partner with them rather than just a vendor. You win because you’re helping them to win.
When I have a question with one of my websites, I typically contact Media Temple over Twitter. Answers come back within minutes. That quick of a reply shows me the Media Temple team’s commitment to my success.
Especially in the app world, critics point towards large support teams as failures of the app designers to make their app “user-friendly”. That’s total B.S.
I work on a support team that’s the largest chunk of the company. It’s large because we want to be partners with our customers rather than just vendors. We want to help them and to do so quickly.
Our goal is five-minute response times. When something goes wrong or you need help, more than that is a long time to wait. A large team helps us reply to customers faster.
By focusing on a fast response, I’ve chosen to be a partner with our customers. Sure, it’s a decision that costs a bit more money but it’s the right choice. If the tables were flipped, I’d want them to do the same thing for me as their customer.
What were some of the fastest response times that you’ve experienced? Did it make you feel like the company actually cared?
Every week, there’s some great articles out there on customer support and the overall customer experience. Most of us working on support teams tend to be busy helping customers so we don’t have a chance to go scouring the web for them.
To fix that, I’ve got a brand new section of the Support Ops site with the customer support roundup. Each weekend, our team here will make sure you’ve got the best articles from the past week. Weekends are perfect for reading so it’s a good chance to see what might have been missed in the past week.
If you’ve got any articles or links that we’ve missed, make sure to let us know in the comments.
Grab that cup of coffee and dig in!
Tender is a great little support app with all of the features a growing support team might need. It seems to be geared toward start-up type organizations, with a minimalist design, only the features you need, and an “easy as email” feel. LIke most other similar applications, Tender replaces a simple support email address and aggregates and tracks support requests in an easy to use interface. It also offers a great Knowledge Base where users can search for answers themselves before contacting support.
Customizing the look and feel of your helpdesk with Tender is easy as well. Changing text, adding custom CSS, and using your own custom domain name are super simple. You can even integrate your own app’s login system with Tender so there’s no need for your users to create another account!
Pricing is comparable to other services available out there. It starts at $9/month with the top-tier plan coming in at $99/month. You get a free 14-day trial to test it out and kick the tires.
And one neat perk is that open source projects get a free account!
While we at Ubuntu One didn’t end up choosing Tender, I would still highly recommend it. Our needs are rather unique, so we needed something a little more robust and customizable. However, if you’re looking for a very simple, easy to use solution to get up and running quickly, you should definitely take a look at Tender.
This is part of the Customer Support App Review series. Read more articles in the series.
From Tim Schraeder:
Regardless of what type of brand or organization you represent on social media, you have to remember that social media is, at its roots, social. It’s dialogue. A conversation. An opportunity to connect. Sometimes we forget that. Sometimes we can automate our tweets and updates and share great content but completely miss the human element that makes social media, social.
It’s the problem we have whenever we use technology. It’s easy to lose sight of the human on the other end. Email, Twitter, Facebook – they’re all great tools. Just don’t forget about the human element to them.
If you haven’t noticed yet, we’re pretty fanatical about support. When it comes to the tools we use to support our customers, we’ve tried a lot. Being the sharing types that we are, customer support tool reviews seemed a natural thing to do.
A little background before we begin. I work at Canonical providing customer support for users of Ubuntu One. Since being hired, I’ve been working on finding and transitioning our support to a newer, more robust application. While doing the research, I was talking with Chase quite a bit. He suggested that maybe I should write a few posts on the tools I looked into and why we ended up deciding on the one that we did.
What follows is by no means an exhaustive review of each tool, but I hope these reviews will at least get you started if you’re looking to implement something for the first time, or you’re not satisfied with your current tool. The list below is in no particular order except that I’m saving the one we went with for the end. Enjoy, and feel free to hit me up on Twitter with any comments/questions.
These are the ones I focused on in the hunt.
If you use one that’s not listed here, I’d love to add your review to the list. Just get in touch with us here.
Now on to the reviews!