Customer Support and Service Articles

Integrated Clinical Systems, Inc. is a major provider of data visualization and reporting software solutions to the pharmaceutical industry. The Frenchtown, NJ based company’s data analysis tools – Integrated ReviewTM and JReview – are used extensively in clinical drug trials for patient profiling, reporting, graphing, ad-hoc data mining and other complex analytical tasks.

“We were looking to replace a costly existing system that had been in-place for about six years, but just was not a good fit for our business,” said Bob Stephens, the company’s director of professional services. “A key ICS objective for any prospective solution was to improve communications, both internally and with customers, so that issues could be jointly addressed and resolved.” Among other top goals: Enhancing the software development process with greater feedback and end-user interaction, and boosting efficiency throughout the organization.

“TeamSupport really matched what we needed: It’s very focused on software development, defect tracking and feature management; it has a customer portal and it’s hosted – reducing our IT overhead. Plus, it’s intuitive and easy to use, both for us and our customers … it was such a nice scaled-back approach compared to some other products that need months of training just to learn the basics,” said Stephens.

The ICS team worked with TeamSupport staff to extract and import data from the existing support application, “We had a lot of historical data; our biggest concern was retaining all of it so we wouldn’t have to start over from scratch. The TeamSupport folks walked us through the conversion process and make it all seem easy. We have a great new system and all of our old data – the best of both worlds!”

ICS deployed their licenses across three separate, but interrelated functional groups: the customer-facing Professional Services team, Quality Assurance andSoftware Development. As is typical when anything new is introduced into the workplace, initial reactions were “Oh my gosh, how do I use this?” But after spending a few minutes with TeamSupport, they’d say “Gee, that was so easy!” related Stephens.

One critical feature before ICS could go live – a non-realtime “web conversation” capability for the self-service customer portal – was committed to and quickly implemented by TeamSupport. It enables actions to be tracked and emails linked to the record of any ongoing issue. Using the portal, end-users can interact with ICS staff, as well as monitor the status of their own issues and feature requests. “When customers get a positive response and timely feedback, then they’ll like [the portal] and continue using it,” said Stephens. “It’s not enough for the programmer to pick-up a bug and start to work on it; the customer needs to know what’s happening … it gives them a sense that we’re doing something!”

ICS has been up and running for about six months now and the improvements are perfectly obvious to Stephens, “TeamSupport has eliminated the guesswork and given us positive control over communications and issue tracking. Our people are using it to boost productivity and our customers value the interactive dialogue available through the web portal. I would definitely recommend TeamSupport to others!”

-Eric Harrington

(Dallas, TX November 6, 2009) TeamSupport.com – an integrated SaaS based customer service, product management, and bug tracking system – today announced that Data Financial, Inc. (www.DataFinancial.com), a major supplier

of financial equipment and software solutions for the banking, gaming and retail industries, has joined the growing community of TeamSupport clients.

“We researched more than a dozen options,” reported product manager Eric Back; “they were either totally dedicated to versioning and software bugs or narrowly focused on tracking phone calls. TeamSupport combines both and was very, very simple on the front end, another big requirement for us. It’s a tool our people could simply log-into and start using,” he continued, “We’ve integrated TeamSupport with Beanstalk’s source code management, and now, although we’re all experts on the individual software packages we support, we’re able to search the entire knowledge base for solutions,” Back concluded.

“We are very pleased to welcome Data Financial to our rapidly expanding family of satisfied users,” said Robert C. Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport.com. “We helped Data Financial set up the data interface with their Beanstalk versioning software and provided technical support and guidance to insure an effortless implementation experience for Data Financial’s end-users,” added Johnson.

About Data Financial

Founded in 1983, Mequon, WI-based Data Financial, Inc. serves the financial equipment and systems needs of gaming, banking and retail with systems solutions, custom software applications and a wide range of hardware products representing most major manufacturers.

Data Financial contact: Eric Back 1-800-334-8334 / EBack@DataFinancial.com

- Eric Harrington

Since early on at TeamSupport, we’ve been using a great hosted Subversion (SVN) platform called BeanStalk to host our code repository.

If you’re not a developer, this probably won’t make much sense to you, but I’ll give it a shot:  Subversion, or SVN, is a widely used source control system.  It lets develops check in (or “commit”) their code, see changes from previous versions, roll back to another version, etc.  A source control system is critically important for developing software, and SVN is a great tool.  Here’s a Wikipedia article about Subversion, and another about version control in general.

Some companies install SVN locally which is a fine option, but since we’re a SaaS company we wanted a hosted provider for a number of reasons:  The two primary reasons were simplicity and redundancy.  BeanStalk is wonderfully simple to set up and they are religious about backing up and protecting our code, so they were a perfect fit for us.

Needless to say, we’ve been happy users of BeanStalk and when it came time to do some integration work with source repositories we wanted to do BeanStalk first.  This solved a very real problem for us (integrating our source control with our bug tracking system), and also let us be our own beta testers.

We contacted BeanStalk and they were very accommodating to work with, and we quickly put together a very slick integration.

Once you have linked TeamSupport and BeanStalk (you can read about the technical stuff in our help file), whenever a developer “commits” a new version of code he will put the version number and the specific tickets which are addressed in the commit description.

That causes BeanStalk to automatically send us a message and we then add an action to each one of the tickets modified with the commit information.

One of the neatest things is that there is a link in the action to BeanStalk which lets developers look at that particular code revision and see the actual lines of code which were changed.  Pretty powerful stuff!

We have been using this integration ourselves for our various applications and have found it very useful – We hope you to do!  We would also appreciate any feedback about how we could improve the integration.

The concept for TeamSupport evolved from experiences we had at previous companies.  We were a pretty typical software company and dealt with issues, bugs, features, etc. that our customers threw at us.  Like most software companies, we looked at the market for some technology to help us deal with these, and looked at the major help desk, issue tracking, and bug tracking systems.

However, we didn’t find any that did what we needed.

None of the bug tracking systems had information about the customer!  They were designed solely for the development team, and operated in a vacuum.  As a software CEO, it never made any sense to me that the development team should operate without understanding the client, their needs, and their bugs.  After all, who is the software written for anyway?

Since we couldn’t find a bug tracking system that met our needs, we looked at the issue tracking and help desk systems.  Most of them tracked customers, but none of them dealt with the product!

So, we could have a system that handled customers and tied issues to them but not the product, or a system that dealt with the product but not the customer.   Rock, meet hard place…

Most companies facing this problem end up with two solutions – One for the support group to deal with customers and another for the development group to deal with the product.  We didn’t like this solution, so we wrote our own internal tool, and that experience led to the development of TeamSupport.

Of course, most companies today have some flavor of a CRM which tracks their customers, contacts, etc.  The natural evolution for a ticketing system is to integrate with the CRM.

TeamSupport has no desire to be a CRM system, but we do compliment their functions.  The CRM systems are great at sales and marketing, but typically not so great at dealing with the types of tickets that software companies need (most built-in issue systems in CRMs are geared towards the help desk crowd and do a nice job of integrating with customer data, but completely ignore the product side of the house).

To solve this problem, we offer integration with CRM systems.

Currently this is a pretty basic level of integration, but we have more on the roadmap and will be announcing a deeper integration in the coming months.  For now, however, please take a look at our documentation under “CRM Integration” to learn more about how to integrate TeamSupport with your CRM system.

We use SalesForce at Muroc and have a nice button labeled “TeamSupport” at the top of our account page.  We can be working in SalesForce and with a click of the mouse be looking at the customer detail page in TeamSupport with all of the customer’s issues, bugs, features, and tasks.   Pretty cool!

I’m sure if you are looking for a ticketing or bug tracking solution, you have noticed that there are a LOT of solutions out there.  There are many good systems on the market and even many free ones.

So, why in this obviously overpopulated market did we decide to create another one?

As I mentioned in a previous post, the three principals of TeamSupport worked together at our previous company.  We developed software for television stations and found that our customers were quite demanding when it came to customer support.  Our software ran their TV stations and it was critical that it ran all of the time.  Any mistake in the software, or problem using it, cold knock the TV station off the air.  TV stations operate 24/7/365 which means our software and customer service had to operate 24/7/365 as well.  As you can imagine, customer service in that type of organization is critical.

When we started to look for a good ticketing solution, we found that there were a number of them that were focused on the support group, but none that integrated the product information (for example, you couldn’t assign an issue to a product or to a specific version of a product easily).  We also found that virtually none of the ticketing systems dealt with the customers.  We started thinking about it and realized that it would be very powerful to integration the issue with the product and the customer.

Thinking about it more, it occurred to us that limiting the ticketing system to the support group only dealt with the problem half way – The support group and the product development groups are inherently tied together.  When a customer calls with a product bug, the support team can’t do anything about it and have to pass it to the development team.

We have observed many companies  develop “silos” where the support team uses one piece of software and the development team uses another.  To complicate things even more, the sales people typically have no idea what’s happening with their customers and can get blindsided.  To avoid this, the sales folks would waste a lot of their time chasing this vital information down as opposed to actually selling!

So, back to the original question:  Why TeamSupport?  Because an effective software company must integrate support and development. Having separate products for these two functions creates natural organizational boundaries and takes the software development group farther away from the customer.

By allowing these two groups to work together closely, you will end up with happier customers and a better product.  In my experience, happy customers and a great product are an excellent recipe to make a company grow!

- Robert Johnson