Archives for July 2013

You’ve heard of an air traffic controller, right? They’re the person that keeps all those airplanes in the sky flowing smoothly.

When your team is small, you’ll want to have someone who helps do the same thing for your support emails. They’ll be something like an email traffic controller.

In the morning, you’ll have a ton of emails in your support inbox from overnight. Some are going to need answers right away while others can wait for a moment. Things like someone being locked out of their account is way more important than someone with an idea they want to share.

Have someone who can triage your inbox and take care of the higher priority ones. It can be something as simple as assigning a label to them or putting those emails in their own queue. If you’ve got people on your team that specialize in certain emails, the same person can pass out emails to specific people. That way, if you have a billing person, the billing question gets sent over to them.

Just like an air traffic controller helps flights flow smoothly, your email controller can make sure those important emails get taken care of first.

You probably have a good handle on what individual customers think about your product just from the support emails you answer. But support cases are a tough place to get a general sense of what all of your customers are thinking. For that, you’ll want to use some sort of survey.

Here’s a few simple things to keep in mind as your crafting your survey so it’ll actually work.

1) Keep them short.

Your survey should be drop dead simple because happy people usually don’t answer long ones.  The only time I’ve ever taken more than 5 minutes to fill out a survey is when my Internet company screwed me over.

2) Don’t use the word “satisfaction”.

When I’m in a hurry and want to buy a product at the cheapest price, I head to my local Wal-Mart. It’s not a great experience by any means but since I can get that product quickly and cheaply, I’m generally satisfied with that experience. Just because I’m satisfied doesn’t mean I like it.

A better gauge is “happiness”, even though the support industry is on the verge of over-using it. Instead of asking if a customer is satisfied with you, ask if they’re happy. It’s a small wording tweak but a powerful one.

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When you think help desk, think HelpSpot. It’s designed to handle anything you want to throw at it. Email support, phone support, web support – you name it, it can handle it. There’s a reason why big teams like Campaign Monitor and the University of Michigan use it and trust it.

The basics

HelpSpot covers all the basics really well. Your queue is easy to organize and see what’s going on at a glance. You’ll be able to pull questions in from emails, your web portal, even your own setup using the API. As you grow, it’ll scale right along with you. Throw thousands of support tickets a day at it and watch it handle them all.

You’ll be able to set up workflows to handle the inflow of tickets. There’s triggers and automatic notifications to make sure you never miss anything. Those also come in handy for meeting any SLAs that you have with customers.

HelpSpot is for customer support what Outlook used to be for email (back when Outlook was the defacto email app). It’s the whole deal that’s able to handle any level of support that you want to provide to your customers.

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