Customer Support and Service Articles

TeamSupport.com (http://www.TeamSupport.com) – the popular provider of web-based customer support and help desk software solutions –has announced the addition of a new “Community” feature for the Advanced Customer Portal of the company’s flagship support application.

Communities, sometimes called forums, let end-users interact with each other as well as company support specialists through TeamSupport’s Customer Portal. They provide the enterprise with a means to notify customers, provide progress updates, solicit feedback, and even let users help to analyze and solve problems. Communities are a venue where everyone can share ideas, experiences and gained knowledge with no limit to the number of exchanges and collaborations. Posts are integrated directly with TeamSupport tickets so support staff can keep-up with discussion threads and customer communications. For a more detailed description, please visit http://help.teamsupport.com/customer-portal/advanced-portal/community

“We developed this new feature to empower customers to help each other and themselves,” said company CEO Robert C. Johnson. “TeamSupport is continually evolving to provide our users with greater flexibility in managing their help desk and support activities. We firmly believe that satisfied, well informed customers are the foundation of any successful business.”

Used by customer support and 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.

About TeamSupport
TeamSupport.com is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dallas, TX-based Muroc Systems, Inc. (http://www.MurocSystems.com), a holding company focused on developing productivity enhancing software products delivered via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Managing Customer service on your website is much like coaching a soccer team. When playing soccer, your goalie is the absolute last line of defense. Good teams don’t treat the goalie like they’re the only line of defense – in fact, it’s best to pretend there is no goalie. This means your back line puts in all the work and the goalie only cleans up when all else is lost.

This is exactly how you should treat the customer service capabilities of your website. You can answer so many of your customers’ questions simply by optimizing your website to its full CSR capacity. You want your back line, your website, to be so helpful that when they call you, the goalie, you know it’s of utmost importance. Here are three ways to make sure your back line is doing its job.

1. Wiki

Back in the old days, websites would have a short FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section to answer the most common inquiries they received. However, the more complicated the online commerce world gets, the more in-depth a guide you need.

Instead of a FAQ, how about an entire Wiki? This makes a great member of your customer service backline, perhaps even the Sweeper or Center Fullback. A Wiki can cover however much information you need it to, from standard operations to intricate mysteries that have arisen over the years.

Plus, one of the best things about having your information on a Wiki as it’s easily edited by staff. When something changes, it’s easy to put it up for everyone to see. Now you have the most up to date information and your customers have instant knowledge about your company.

2. Knowledge Base

In the event your Wiki doesn’t catch something and your customer still feels confused, you should offer them further means to find out the answers. This can even include articles and questions from other customers. Often, consumers find errors and issues with products or services nobody in the company ever dreamed.

When submitting them to your website, these questions can go into a knowledgebase. This way, your customers simply search for a question they have. If it’s been raised before by a customer, it will pop up and they hopefully have their answer. If not, they can pose the question themselves and an alert will inform you there’s a question waiting to be answered.

3. Forum

Some soccer plays sail in on the sidelines, completely out of nowhere. During these times, you want strong Left and Right Fullbacks to rush in and save the day. On your website, these sideline plays are akin to completely random issues that seem to pop out of thin air. When these times come, your Side Fullback is your community or user forum.

On the community, your customers can not only interact with each other but also directly interact with members of your staff. This way, if there’s a particularly difficult problem and everyone is up in arms about it, you can let everyone know you’re working on it as well as get feedback on progress you’ve made. In certain circumstances, customers can even help you figure out the issue! We all need a little help sometimes and a forum is a great way to get it.

Better yet, the community facilitates more than just customer service. Users can talk about new ways to use your product or service, share war stories, and even find ways to collaborate. What’s better than a user base who feels connected to your company and to each other?

TeamSupport offers a one stop portal for these and all your customer service needs! While we all want to be the player who scores the goals, more often than not it’s more important to have all the positions on the field covered. With these features from TeamSupport, you can rest assured your defense is up to speed!

Today we launched a new and improved Advanced Customer Portal.  What changed?

1.  New look and feel making it easier for your customers to self serve.  See example screen shot below.

2.  Your customers can see tickets you have associated with them individually as well as their organization.

3.  Customers can download their tickets to excel.

3.  The Knowledge base displays both ticket KB’s as well as Wiki articles that have been made visible to your customers.

4.  Searching will return ticket results & KB/Wiki articles.

5.  Your customers can manage their personal information as well as their login password.

Feature side note #1:  The Advanced Portal is only available in the Enterprise and Support Desk Edition.  Also, the Support Desk edition will not include the Products section.

Feature side note #2:   Within your TeamSupport account under the Wiki section, there is a new option to mark an article visible on the portal.  You will see this option when either creating or editing an article.

-Eric Harrington

One of the core principles of TeamSupport is integrating the customer with the customer support and development teams. While the core TeamSupport application does an excellent job of bringing together internal teams, I want to take a moment and let  you know about a couple of tools we have which can bring the customers into the mix.

We offer two types of customer portals called – simply – “Advanced” and “Basic”.

The Advanced portal allows you to give individual logins to your customers.  They can then access the portal to review the status of their open tickets, add actions (including attachments) to those tickets, see their historical tickets, and view and search the knowledgebase.  They can also view product version history information for the products they are licensed for.

You have complete control over what information is shown on the portal, and can designate both tickets and actions within those tickets to be private and not displayed on the portal.

The Advanced Portal gives your customers access to their ticket information and lets them perform “self service”.  This will both decrease the load on your support staff and also increase customer  satisfaction.  You can’t ask for a much better “win win” than this!

Users of TeamSupport can access our instance of the advanced portal by clicking on the “Support” button in the upper right of the TeamSupport screen.  You can log into the portal with your same username and password and see how we use the portal internally to support our customers.

The basic portal is, as you’ve probably guessed, more basic than the advanced portal.  It simply allows a user to create a new ticket via a form without having to login.  They can add information about a problem and attach files then submit the ticket.  Your support team will be notified of the new ticket and can take the appropriate action.

Both portals are very plain from a design standpoint, and are meant to fit into an iFrame within your website.

More information about the the customer portals may be found here.