There’s so much talk of happiness going on these days. Everyone wants to make sure your customers are happy, your employees are happy, and your pets are happy. It’s easy to be cynical about it.

But the truth is, happiness is important. Happy employees outperform their less than happy counterparts. Happy customers stick around with you instead of leaving for some other company. And happy pets, well… they just have more fun.

Let’s talk about you.

Work can be tough sometimes. Anytime you deal with customers, it’s challenging. You get three rough customers back to back and it feels like you’re not doing anything right.

Instead of letting those customers rain on your parade, stop and look at what’s made you happy this week.

Before you leave work today, make a list of three things that made you happy this week. It can be big things like rolling out a new design for your help site. It can be small things like the thank you card the customer sent you. Anything at all as long as it’s three things that made you a little happier.

Go on. Write them down. I’ll wait.

Got them?

Feels great, right? Often, we’ll only remember the negative interactions we had with customers and our team from work. Even if you had ten or twenty people who loved you, that one who didn’t will stick out in our minds. Writing these down will help you remember those happy ones whenever you start focusing on just the negative one.

You’re a customer support professional. You’re job is to help people and make them happy. Don’t lose your happiness along the way.

What three things made you happy this week?

Help Scout does one thing really, really well – provide the best way to do email support. The team focuses on that first as the driving force behind their product. And I gotta say, they do it well.

The App Itself

Since they focus on email, most of your customers won’t even see you’re using it. Messages to your customers look just like regular email. That means your customers won’t need to learn some complicated support tool just to get help. On your team’s side, you’ll be able to set up customer profiles as expected. It’ll keep track of the past conversations you’ve had with them. Adding notes to a case works just like you would expect, which will let you communicate with your team without the customer seeing those notes. Being focused on email with this app means that you won’t be using this for other support channels like Twitter or Facebook. That can be a pretty big drawback if you’re using those channels aggressively. But if you’re just using email, this app’s great.

Resources

One thing I love about the Help Scout team is their focus on helping you get better at customer support. It’s something that led me to work with them when releasing my own guide for writing better emails. Their resources page is top-notch. From ebooks to guides to online classes, they help you know your customer better, which means you can support them better. Win-win for everyone.

Pricing

They’re really generous with their entirely free plan. It’s 3 users, one mailbox, and comes Help Scout branded. But it’s free so that’s a good trade-off there. Beyond that, it’s really simple. Each user is $15 per month. Unlimited emails, unlimited storage, a plethora of integrations, and free support from their great support team.

Final verdict

A solid contender in the support app space. The app’s great for focusing on email support. The support team behind it is fantastic. Go check it out for yourself here.

This is part of the Customer Support App Review series. Read more articles in the series.

At Swiftype, we take pride in the quality of our support. We want our customers to be confident that when they choose Swiftype, we will back them up. We are a small company, and everyone does support, including the engineers. We think this is important because it exposes developers to the problems customers are facing and uncovers bugs. Support requests are how software gets better.

When I started at Swiftype as the first employee, the founders were doing support with a shared Gmail inbox. Even with just a few people, this was clearly unworkable, so I started evaluating support software. My goal was to find software that would let us all share email support duties.

I initially looked at Desk.com and Zendesk. While I was trialing those two, I heard about SupportBee from Hacker News and decided to try it as well. (Disclaimer: SupportBee uses Swiftype but we were not aware of that when we started using their product.)

Note: these observations are based on when I evaluated the services, Fall 2012.

It’s Just Email. But it really works.

I was disappointed with Zendesk and Desk.com’s HTML email support. Zendesk strips HTML entirely. It is a long-standing issue (Note: apparently there is now a way to view the original email in Zendesk). Desk.com allows you to log into the web UI and see the HTML email but doesn’t send it to you.

SupportBee’s HTML email support is superb. The emails are delivered pretty much exactly as the original email looked with a small header added. Even inline images work. You can also view HTML emails online (though the styling of the web application can cause them to look slightly off).

Example of a SupportBee support request as it is displayed in Gmail.

SupportBee allows you to use an email-based workflow. You can reply to the support request as a normal email and it will be stored on SupportBee and then sent to the customer. Replying to support requests includes any HTML formatting, attachments, and inline images. It really works.

One feature I wish SupportBee had was some way of stopping duplicate replies (I believe HelpScout has something like this, but I haven’t tried it). We are dealing with this by following a support schedule.

If you need integrated Twitter, Facebook, or phone support, SupportBee probably isn’t for you. But if you work primarily with email support and want to have an inbox-centered workflow, I recommend checking it out.

Web UI

Of the three support software products I trialed, Zendesk had by far the snappiest web user interface. It was very smooth and fluid. Desk.com on the other hand felt slow and clunky. SupportBee falls between the two. It’s not quite as zippy as Zendesk but smoother than Desk.com. I usually use SupportBee from my inbox, but you need to log in to assign tickets or leave a comment.

The SupportBee web UI for a support request.

API

SupportBee has a developer API. We are currently using it to post a comment on the support ticket with customer information from our database when we receive a support request. This gives us quick access to that customer’s details in our administrative dashboard.

Pricing

SupportBee’s pricing really works well for companies that want to do full-company support because you pay per ticket instead of per agent. Prices start at $19/month for 300 tickets a month (a ticket is like a thread in Gmail, replies are not counted as new tickets).

You can sign up for SupportBee here.

This is part of the Customer Support App Review series. Read more articles in the series.

In a perfect world, your support team would be able to handle anything thrown at it. Need a bug fixed within the app? Easy. How about an account restored from a backup? Done. You’d be like Iron Man saving your customer’s day while inside that snazzy armor.

In the real world, you’re going to need a programmer to work with. And no – it’s not going to be Jarvis. (Alright, I’ll stop with the superhero talk).

But how do you steal a programmer away to work on the things you need help with?

Enter the On Call Programmer

An On Call programmer works primarily with support during the week, two weeks, or whatever amount of time you want to set for the stretch. During that time, they can handle those pesky bugs and other things that crop up with customer emails. After the cases are cleared out, they can work on other things to help out the support team like new internal tools, better access to data, etc.

The big thing is that the On Call programmer is there to help support first and foremost. They’ll get a chance to see firsthand some of the common customer issues. And you’ll get a programmer to ask questions without interrupting their work on other projects.

The Flow

Here’s how it works in practice.

• You get a case that needs to be run by a programmer. You add a note with your question and assign it an “on call” label.
• The programmer opens the case, does what’s needed, then leaves a note on it. Then they flip the case back to you.

And that’s it. Super easy on both sides. The programmer can handle each case as it comes through the queue. It’ll make the support team / programmer team interactions way easier for everyone involved.

Do you have a dedicated programmer for support help or do you just grab anyone that’s free?