Customer Support and Service Articles

TeamSupport.com, a provider of software-as-a-service-based customer service and help desk tools, today announced the release of a significant enhancement to data sharing between its flagship customer support application and Salesforce.com.

“In addition to importing basic user and account information into TeamSupport, users of Salesforce are now able to map custom fields created in the CRM system,” said Robert Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport.com. “It greatly expands the range of client data accessible to TeamSupport users within the organization, and that translates into better communication between workgroups, increased productivity, and ultimately, happier customers.”

Employed by customer support and corporate help desks worldwide, TeamSupport is easily configured and customized; the application is offered in several reasonably priced, upgradeable versions. TeamSupport is scalable from a simple help-desk application to a 100+ seat enterprise-wide customer support and product defect tracking system.

TeamSupport.com – an emerging leader in SaaS-based customer service and help desk tools – today announced an integration of the company’s flagship TeamSupport product with Zoho, a provider of affordable, on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The native integration enables users of Zoho CRM to sync company and contact information directly into TeamSupport, while making support ticket data visible within the CRM interface. “Our API-compliant plug-in gives Zoho users the flexibility to chose a laser-focused Help Desk solution to optimize their sales, marketing, contact management and customer service activities,” said Robert C. Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport. Once set-up – a few minutes at the keyboard – the two programs automatically update data via a 24/7 background service; new tickets created in TeamSupport appear as notes within the customer’s Zoho record. “We are very pleased to offer users of this popular CRM product a cost-effective solution for collaboration and data sharing within their organizations.”

Employed by customer support and corporate help desks worldwide, TeamSupport is easily configured and customized; the application is offered in several reasonably priced, upgradeable versions. TeamSupport is scalable from a simple help-desk application to a 100+ seat enterprise-wide customer support and product defect tracking system.

Take a look at this help document to find out more about how it works.

We are excited to announce a successful integration between our own SaaS-based customer service and help desk tool and Batchbook, a powerful social CRM system from BatchBlue Software.  You can read more about TeamSupport’s integration with Batchbook in this press release. To find out more about how it works, read this help document.

GetApp.com recently conducted an indepth evaluation of our software and as a result – published an online review. This review provides insight from a neutral party and will help customers shopping for customer support software.  You can read the entire review here.

I had a great conversation today with a sales person who was pretty pissed about the support operation in his company.  His story was nothing new to me.

He went on to describe how his customers call him to make sure he knows the system they bought is not working and no one in his company  “seems to have a clue”.  To make matters worse, this sales person has no visibility to the support software because “that is for the support staff only”.

He does not work in the “office” and travels a lot so being in the “know” is a must.  When his customers call to complain, he sends emails and leaves voice mails to his support department asking (and begging) for updates on issues his customers have reported.  Like the customer, he is in the dark and is very frustrated.  Yes, the customer should contact support but let’s face it, when you are dealing with enterprise type sales, the one who sold it is on the hook just as much as anyone else in the company.

We shared a few war stories and I let him know his situation was one of many reasons why we started TeamSupport.

TeamSupport is not a sales tool.  We do not track and manage leads, opportunities, deals, etc.  We focus on the support aspect of the operation but with a twist.  We make it really simple for everyone in the company to have visibility on tickets, customers, products and more.  We also have integration to popular CRMs like Salesforce and Highrise.

When we were laying the foundation for TeamSupport, one unique feature we added for the sales team (and anyone in the company) is the ability to subscribe to customers.  If a sales person wants to know when their customer has reported a problem, they can simply subscribe to that customer.  Anytime a ticket is associated or modified with their customer, an email containing all of the information is sent to the sales person and anyone else in the company who has subscribed to them.  We also have this same feature for individual tickets as well.

This feature also relieves pressure on the support staff.  Now that others in the company have access to this data, there is no need for co-workers to call or email and ask for updates and waste valuable time.  You want to know about it?  Log into TeamSupport and see for yourself – or subscribe to customers and tickets – and the information will come to you in real time – as it happens.

Imagine being in sales and receiving notifications the moment your customer is having a problem.  Now the sales team can be proactive and reach out to their customers and let them know – that they know about the issue.  The perception is no longer “your company does not have a clue” but rather “you guys are on the ball”.

Everyone is on the same page and in a much better position to work together as a team.  Sales people can even update tickets with key information they obtain from the customer.  When they do this, the support team is notified with an email.

Jerome Pineau wrote a great blog about how TeamSupport helps the SE’s of the world which you can read here.

- Eric Harrington

Our very own Robert Johnson discusses the need to break down internal silos in order to yield more-satisfied customers in a guest editorial for DestinationCRM.com

Click here to read the full article on the DestinationCRM.com site.

-Robert Johnson

We are very pleased to be able to announce that TeamSupport.com is now a certified Salesforce.com AppExchange partner and you can find our AppExchange listing here.

What does this mean?

We can now synchronize customer data from Salesforce.com to TeamSupport.com.  Once the integration is set up, the processes is simple:  Just change the “Account Type” pulldown in Salesforce to “Customer” (or any keyword of your choice) and the account information and contact details will be automatically synced with TeamSupport.  Also, when a new ticket is created in TeamSupport a note will be generated in your Salesforce account with information about the ticket.

The best way to learn more about this integration is to watch this brief video.

Security Audit

An interesting part of the AppExchange listing process is that Salesforce performed a very exhaustive security audit on TeamSupport.  We have always taken security extremely seriously at TeamSupport, but having an external company perform an audit – including sophisticated hacking probes – was an interesting exercise.  I’m very proud to say that TeamSupport held up very well and we passed the audit with flying colors!

This means that you can be even more confident about the security of your data in TeamSupport.

- Robert Johnson

TeamSupport does an excellent job of integrating the customer service, product management, and product development teams within an organization, but we never designed it to be a tool for the sales and marketing teams.  There are a lot of great CRM systems out there that serve this market, and we didn’t feel the need to  reinvent the wheel, so instead we decided to integrate with leading CRM providers.

We’re excited to announce today that we’ve released integration with 37Signal’s Highrise CRM system!  Highrise is a great CRM tool for teams, and we feel it is very complimentary with TeamSupport.  Highrise excels in managing contacts, people and deals, but it doesn’t have a ticket management system and is not focused towards the same departments that TeamSupport is.  The combination of the two is very powerful and something we’ve grown addicted to internally!

Highrise Company & People Data -> TeamSupport

The integration workflow is very straightforward:  Once you have closed a sale and want to convert a contact into a customer so you can start tracking issues with them, simply tag the company as a “Customer” in Highrise and the customer and all of their contact data will be sent over to TeamSupport.  After you’ve tagged a customer, any changes in that customer’s information will be sent to TeamSupport so the databases will remain in sync.

TeamSupport Tickets -> Highrise

Also, when you create a new ticket in TeamSupport a new Note will be created in the company’s record in Highrise.  This will let your sales team keep up to date on any issues their customers are having and be proactive in making sure they are being addressed.  The note also contains a hyperlink to the ticket data within TeamSupport so you can drill down and see all of the information with a single click.

It’s a very simple and elegant integration which will give your team two best of breed solutions and close the gap between sales, customer service, product management, and product development.

More Information

You can learn more by going to our on-line documentation, and you can see a short video demonstration below:

For more information, please take a look at this short video which walks you through a demo:

Integration To Highrise Video

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 am always amazed when I hear clients talk about how they never hear from their vendors – especially the technical folks.

When was the last time you picked up the phone (not email!) and called your customer to see how they are doing?  How many minutes of the week do you devote to just making random calls to customers?

Notice, I said minutes, not hours.   I believe if each customer support representative would take 30 minutes out of their entire work week to call a few customers, pretty soon your organization will have made contact with several of them, and maybe, just maybe, put some smiles on a few faces.

The conversation does not need to be long.  Nor does it need to involve the product or service you are providing.  It can be as simple as “Hello X, this is Y from abc123.  I just wanted to call and see how you’re doing today..”  In my experience, this extremely basic outreach helped me develop some great friendships and it strengthened my customer relations.  It only took a few minutes of my time but the benefits were tremendous.

So why do so many avoid this interaction?  Is it feared that the customer may task you with more work or worse, complain?  I say fear not.  Someone gave me really good advice once and it went something like this: take your customer list, pick a handful of names and numbers each week, then pass those around to the support folks and have them spend 20-30 minutes a week just making these types of calls. Caller beware!  This must be a genuine act.  If not, the phoniness will stink up the air.

Within six months, you will be amazed at how your customers interact with your company.  They will also tell others about their experience which will in turn open up more opportunities for business and friendship.

- Eric Harrington