Here at TeamSupport we work tirelessly to provide the best help desk and customer support software and we were thrilled to discover our efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. TeamSupport was recently honored with a Gold award for best customer support software in the Network Products Guide 2013 Hot Companies and Best Products competition.

Network Products Guide, the industry’s leading technology research and advisory guide, singled out TeamSupport’s cloud-based help desk software as one of the year’s best client support software products. Recognized as one of the best providers of collaborative customer service software, TeamSupport accepted the award on May 7, 2013, at the annual ceremony in Las Vegas.

“Winning the Gold honor in the technology sector is a fabulous accolade,” said Robert C. Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport. “Network Products Guide is a well-respected resource in our field, so to be honored among the best of the best truly affirms the hard work we do to help companies serve customers better than ever.”

Check out the complete list of the Network Products Guide 2013 Hot Companies and Best Products.

If you need help improving collaboration within your support team, contact ustoday!

TeamSupport strives to provide the best help desk software for customer support while delivering a collaborative customer service experience focused on customer care.

With that goal in mind, we are honored that TeamSupport’s cloud-based help desk software was singled out as one of the best IT products and services of the year.

TeamSupport.com, the award-winning provider of cloud-based collaborative customer service software, has won a Gold award from Network Products Guide, the industry’s leading technology research and advisory guide. It received the honor in the magazine’s 8th Annual 2013 Hot Companies and Best Products Awards.

Singled out as one of the best IT products and services in the service delivery category, TeamSupport received the honor May 7 at an awards ceremony in Las Vegas.

“Winning the Gold honor in the technology sector is a fabulous accolade,” said Robert C. Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport. “Network Products Guide is a well-respected resource in our field, so to be honored among the best of the best truly affirms the hard work we do to help companies serve customers better than ever.”

TeamSupport’s cloud-based enterprise software helps support teams communicate, collaborate and serve customers better. While many software products take a traditional view of customer support, merely dealing with one ticket at a time, TeamSupport provides a holistic view of the customer, bringing visibility to everyone on the team and enabling full collaboration across teams to solve issues.

Some of TeamSupport’s highly touted features include:

•Ticket integration. Customer requests via telephone, e-mail, chat or social media are integrated into the ticketing system. E-mails never fall through the cracks again!

•Screen recording. Customers can record short videos of their issues (including voice commentary). Service representatives can find a solution rather than waste time trying to identify the issue.

•Ticket automation. Support teams can set specific rules on tickets. One user created a rule to flag and escalate all communications from customers using words like “frustrated” or “angry.”

•WaterCooler. This internal social media tool allows team members to participate in group discussions—in a private forum. Unlike a typical “message board,” the WaterCooler allows users to link online conversations to tickets, issues, groups or people to share information.

The coveted Hot Products award encompasses the world’s best in organizational performance, products and services, executives and management teams, successful deployments, product management and engineering, support and customer satisfaction, and public relations in every area of information technology.

About TeamSupport

TeamSupport.com, based in Dallas, Texas, is a Web-based help desk and service desk application built specifically for customer-facing support.  Built by a team of veteran software company executives, TeamSupport has won many awards and is a trusted software provider to prominent business clients around the globe. Learn more at www.teamsupport.com.

About Network Products Guide Awards

As industry’s leading technology research and advisory publication, Network Products Guide plays a vital role in keeping decision makers and end-users informed of the choices they can make in all areas of information technology. The guide provides a wealth of information and tools including the best products and services, roadmaps, industry directions, technology advancements and independent product evaluations that facilitate in making the most pertinent technology decisions impacting business and personal goals. The guide follows conscientious research methodologies developed and enhanced by industry experts. To learn more, visit www.networkproductsguide.com.

One way TeamSupport’s online help desk makes organizing help desk tickets simpler is with the use of Tags.

Tags is a useful feature of our help desk solution for organizing and searching helpdesk tickets. A tag is a keyword which describes all or part of a ticket. Think of it like a category, but smaller in scope. A ticket may have several tags, many of which relate to it only peripherally. Tags can be created on-the-fly, by simply typing them into the tag field on the ticket form. You can also view all of your tags and sort them in an instant. Tags allow you to organize tickets around keywords that make sense to you. For example:  you could add a tag called “Exchange” to quickly see a list of tickets that involve the exchange server.

TeamSupport’s help desk software presents you with a full tag cloud making it easy to find anything tagged in your account right away. You can place multiple tags on each ticket and also filter your tags. You can group tickets with one another, place multiple tags on ticket and filter them from the Tags section.

To tag a ticket, simply open a ticket and enter in a tag and click the green “plus” button as seen below.  If a tag does not exist, once you add it to a ticket, it will be created and can be viewed in the tag section – There is nothing special you need to do to create a tag, just type in the keyword and hit plus!  If the tag already exists, you will see a box with the tag name in it as you start typing and you can just click on it.

Removing a tag from a ticket is even simpler; just click the “x” next to the tag.  You can also click on the tag name and be taken to the Tags section to see what tickets share these tags.

In addition, any word within the ticket description or action that is also a defined tag can be clicked and will take you to the tags section and show you all tickets with that tag.  This feature allows you to quickly see relevant keywords in the textual descriptions and discover relationships to other help desk tickets you may not have known existed.

TeamSupport is one of the leading help desk software solutions using collaboration to optimize customer service.  For more information on how TeamSupport can help improve your helpdesk, please click here.

And that means we’re always innovating our support software to help companies improve the way they collaborate, communicate and serve their customers better than ever.

From the CEO
Robert C. Johnson

So, we’re especially excited to announce our BRAND NEW full integration with Salesforce, the No. 1 customer management software for sales and marketing. Harness the very best of TeamSupport, one of the best collaborative help desk software suites, and Salesforce.

With our all-new integration, customer information flows seamlessly between TeamSupport and Salesforce.

Create a ticket in TeamSupport and it will automatically create a case in Salesforce.

Create a case in Salesforce and it will automatically create a ticket in TeamSupport.

Make a note to a Salesforce case and it will appear as a TeamSupport  ticket action—and vice versa.

Your entire team—sales, marketing, customer support—will benefit from dramatically improved communication and collaboration. Team members can see the MOST up-to-date information in real time and have a 360-degree view of the customer, no matter where it was entered.

In addition, this new integration will allow you to:

• Synchronize all customer data between the two systems.
• Customize how information is mapped from one field to another between Salesforce and TeamSupport.

Get started in no time! The integration is simple to set up, and in just minutes you’ll be ready to use this powerful new feature.

Need help getting integrated? Want to learn more? Contact us today!

TeamSupport’s customer support software can route customer service emails by the use of Ticket Automation.

An automation trigger can be set up that looks for newly created tickets (the simplest way to do this is to set the “Days Since Ticket Was Created” to less than or equal to 1) that have certain keywords in the title.

This can be done by creating a Trigger and setting two conditions in the “ALL” section:

- “Days Since Ticket was Created” to less than or equal to 1

- Ticket Name contains your keyword

When a new help desk ticket is created (by e-mail or any other method, including the portal) that has that keyword you can set Actions to apply to the ticket including setting a group or individual to be responsible for the ticket.

Another option is to set up an Alternate EMail Dropbox that routes e-mails to different groups and products.

Looking for other helpful hints to help you maximize TeamSupport’s many great features? Visit TeamSupport University today! Don’t see what you’re looking for? Go ahead — Ask us anything.

TeamSupport is a leading customer service software solution.  To learn more about how our customer support management software can help improve your helpdesk, please click here.

The web has provided businesses with many advantages when it comes to customer service; a major one being the ability to help people in many different ways. The web based help desk has been a key factor in providing immediate help to any number of customers. In this rapid day and age of instant gratification, easy and quick accessibility is a must. If you are not entirely sold on the web based servicedesk, here are some of the benefits you may be overlooking.

Simplicity

The real goal for you and everyone else in customer service is to eliminate the gap between a customer having a problem and them getting it fixed. You want this process as painless as possible, for them, you, and the company at large. When this happens, everybody wins.

With a web based helpdesk, simplicity is your company’s middle name. No longer are there dozens of hoops for your customers to leap through to fix their issues. Everything they will ever need is right at their fingertips.

For one, there’s no need for them to hop all over the company website or Facebook page to find what they need. All the phone numbers, email addresses, and other contact info is right there.

Secondly, a web based help desk lets you set up a FAQ for the questions you get all day every day. This cuts down on wait time for your customers and eliminates frustration on your end so you can help with more complicated issues.

Productivity

Easily one of the biggest advantages of this type of customer support system is the ability to take accurate notes and information and share it all with everyone on the team. It’s such a simple thing but it raises the stakes on your performance significantly.

If you run across a complicated problem and are having a little trouble, you may want to bring in someone else with a little more experience or expertise. In older customer service systems you would track your colleague down, talk to them and try to explain the situation, and probably even transfer the customer to your colleague’s phone and hope for the best.

Such a manual process leaves a lot of room for errors. The web based servicedesk helps limit the opportunities where mistakes could be made by putting all the info and notes you could ask for right there. Your colleague picks it up, gets the ticket to help the customer, and you move on to the next customer.

Accessibility

Customers are not just sitting at home or at the office all day. They’re having issues from all over the world while they’re out living life. If a product breaks down, they want a solution immediately, not when they finally go home.

With smartphone and tablet support, web based help desk solutions are the way for customers to get what they need when they need it. They can immediately research their issue on your FAQ or support portal no matter where they are. If that doesn’t help, they can submit a support ticket in no time flat. They go on with their lives and you relax knowing your customers will experience the best kind of customer service; hassle free!

Easy to use and configure, TeamSupport’s online help desk is among the best in customer support software and used by companies of all sizes to manage their support desk.

As the creators of collaborative help desk software, you know that we are huge proponents of collaboration.

From the CEO
Robert C. Johnson

So you might be surprised to hear me caution against being TOO collaborative.

I say this jokingly. But the recent spate of hackings, including last week’s AP hacking that involved the White House, was NOT a laughing matter.

As an experienced software developer AND tech industry executive, I was recently quoted by e-Commerce Times in an article helping consumers protect against online security breaches. I want to share a few tips with you, too. They are simple but bear repeating.

First and foremost, I assure you that when you use TeamSupport, you can be confident that we follow best practices with the highest security measures and back-up systems in place. We use the most comprehensive security measures available and we monitor the performance of our systems constantly. (Read more here.) But it’s essential that you’re protecting the other e-mail and software tools you use.

1. Is your password too easy?
   Most passwords people choose are easy to hack.  We’ve seen this over and over again with things like the phone hacking scandal in the UK and many Twitter accounts being compromised. I suspect most of us have also received fake e-mail from a friend’s personal account that has been hacked.
2. If so, choose one that’s impossible to crack.
    From the user’s perspective, choose passwords that are impossible to guess and hard to crack. Software providers should also strengthen their password policies and implement easy fixes such as locking out accounts after more than 5 login attempts.
3. Keep your eyes open.
   Stay vigilant. Watch for activity that looks unusual or suspicious. When it doubt, check it out.

Unfortunately, hacking has become much easier. Just 20 years ago you needed a modem and to know the phone number of the computer you wanted to attack. Today, most people’s e-mail accounts are accessible via the Web from anywhere and this allows anyone in the world to be able to attempt to hack them.  With the increasing reliance of the world on news from sources such as Twitter and Facebook, the potential impact of a compromised account has gone up exponentially.

A few minutes auditing your passwords now can save you the potential for security breaches in the future.

And if you want to learn more about TeamSupport’s security protocols or need help developing your own, contact us today!

Your partner in service,

Robert C. Johnson
CEO

Collaborative customer service software honored among the top help desk solutions of the year

Adding to its growing list of 2013 industry accolades, TeamSupport.com, the leading cloud-based collaborative help desk software suite, has won another honor—the 2013 CRM Excellence Award from CUSTOMER magazine. The award is sponsored by TMC, publisher of the magazine.

The awards are given to companies who act as true CRM partners to their clients and customers. Winners were chosen on the basis of their product or service’s ability to help extend and expand the customer relationship to become all encompassing.

Robert C. Johnson, co-founder and CEO of TeamSupport, said, “Winning awards from third-party industry experts validates what we do, but what truly matters is helping our customers deliver exceptional service. We know they want to deliver the best customer support possible, and that’s why we’re so proud of our web-based collaborative customer service software. We are pleased and humbled to be recognized for the time, effort and support we put into all our products.”

According to TMC’s CEO and Group Editor-in-Chief Rich Tehrani, TeamSupport has demonstrated that their customer service software has improved the process of their clients’ businesses by streamlining and facilitating the flow of information.”

A complete list of 2013 CRM Excellence Award winners can be found in the May issue of CUSTOMER magazine, the premier publication in the CRM, contact center and teleservices industries since 1982.

TeamSupport aims to provide the best help desk software for customer support with self service tools that help deliver a collaborative and complete customer service experience.

So we’re especially honored to be recognized as one of the best online help desk suites in CUSTOMER magazine’s 2013 CRM Excellence Awards.

From the CEO
Robert C. Johnson

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our loyal customers, especially those who have been with us since the beginning. You are the reason we wake up every morning ready to help solve your toughest service challenges.

And I invite visitors to learn more about why TeamSupport is consistently ranked among the best customer care software suites today. Check out TeamSupport today and see what makes us different than all the rest.

>> Sign up for a no-obligation trial today. Or, better yet, request a personalized demo so we can show you the features that will be most beneficial for YOUR team.

>> Read more about the 2013 CRM Excellence Awards.

>> Drop us a line to let us know what you like best about TeamSupport. We always love hearing from our customers, all help desk exemplars who are delivering the best support possible.

Your partner in service,

Robert C. Johnson
CEO

Help desk, customer support, and customer service teams represent their company and are often the company’s most visible outward face to the customer.

So, it makes sense to get your logo out there in front of the customer. Brand recognition is important, and adding your logo to your customer service emails is a great way to reinforce that customer connection. Providing customer care that exceeds expectations creates an association that will make a long lasting impression.

Here’s a tip on how to add your company logo to the emails from your help desk.

1. Go to Admin, select the Email tab and scroll down the page to where the email templates are located.  Choose the Global template and click the Edit link.

2. On the third line, add the img src tag and location of your logo.  Don’t forget to click the Save button when you are done.

You can immediately see the results by clicking the Preview link next to the Edit link.

Looking for other helpful hints to help you maximize TeamSupport’s many great features? Visit TeamSupport University today! Don’t see what you’re looking for? Go ahead — Ask us anything.