Customer Support and Service Articles

Today we released an exciting new feature in TeamSupport that we call The WaterCooler.

The landscape of help desk and customer support systems hasn’t changed a lot since the concept was invented.  You open a ticket, add some information to it, and (eventually) close it.  Every system developed to date has been some form of this basic idea, and at its heart it is a very individualistic approach.

We believe that solving customers’ (internal or external customers) problems can be accomplished better by allowing the entire team to work together, and we continue to evolve TeamSupport around this concept.

The Water Cooler is a place to gather and converse – about both  support issues and other, less business related things.  Just like a “real” water cooler, TeamSupport’s Water Cooler can be used as a place to reach out and connect with other people in your company on a variety of topics.

Put more technically, the Water Cooler is an internal chat system similar to Twitter and the like except that only your internal teams can see the discussions.

Another way to think of the Water Cooler is a replacement for yelling over cubicle walls.  Anyone who has spent much time in a support department has seen someone yell across the room for assistance on an issue (“Hey, does anyone know how to reset a flammerjammer?”).  The Water Cooler can help all team members reach out across both walls and silos to get help solving a problem.

As we continue to grow TeamSupport we are reaching out into other technology areas and bringing the best ideas into the customer support and help desk departments.  The Water Cooler borrows some of the great ideas from Twitter and other social networking platforms, and of course our Wiki is a great collaborative tool which allows documents to be live and always updated.

For more information on the Water Cooler, please see our documentation here.

-Robert Johnson