Business Practices | | Published October 27, 2014

Customers Really Do Value Better Customer Support

I recently had the opportunity to attend two of our customer’s user conferences, and it was a great experience.

In both cases our customers were presenting TeamSupport to their customers and demnostrating how our software was going to improve their customers’ experience. Obviously, we talk with our clients a lot, but it’s relatively rare that we get to interact with our client’s clients and I took several things away from these experiences.

  1. Customers want better interaction

teamcircle

In both the presentations and in side conversations with customers at these events, it became clear that customers were craving more interaction with their vendors. The legacy systems (email or an outdated ticketing system) that TeamSupport was replacing didn’t offer the tools to enable amazing communication between vendor and customer and this was a point of mutual frustration.

The customers were also excited about the ability to interact with each other using our Community feature. They saw immense value in being able to collaborate on things like best practices and different ways to use the software. Getting a community forum system up and running requires a critical mass of customers being involved and talking, but once it’s operational it’s an excellent resource for both the company and their clients.

  1. Customers want better transparency

smiley

One of the companies I visited has implemented Jira and is using our awesome native integration with them, and the other has deployed TeamSupport to their developers. In both cases, when a customer issue is something that the support department can’t address, they pass the ticket to the development team to handle. The critical part of this is the transparency: The customers now see that the issue has been moved to development, and can watch it progress through the stages there. They can see when and how their issue is being addressed, and in some cases even communicate directly with the developer if more information is needed.I also heard many attendees asking for more transparency. Historically they would ask a question of their vendor and they had little to no idea of what was happening with that request. Specifically, if an issue required getting the software development team involved (a bug or a feature request), their legacy systems provided no way to give customers data about what was going on.

This idea of transparency and opening up some of the internal processes to customers is a hard one for many companies to embrace, but if my conversations with our customers’ customers are any indication, it is something that is widely appreciated when implemented and adds value to both sides of the relationship.

  1. Better customer support really does mean happier and more engaged customers

best customer support experience puzzleIn several cases, typically over a meal or just sharing coffee, the customers attending these

conferences talked about how engaged they were with their vendor and how they appreciated the investment in technology to improve the communication. I wasn’t really expecting them to be as open as they were about this, but needless to say, it made me very happy.

Customers were clearly happy with their vendors and appreciated the open discussions and dialogues that the user conferences and that TeamSupport provided. In both cases, the companies that we had engaged with were actively working to improve their customer support, with both technology (TeamSupport) and better processes. Seeing how much customers truly understand and appreciate this was an eye opener.

I’ve always said that improving customer support will improve the bottom line by making customers happier (“happy customers = more customers” for those of you who have heard me speak or present), and the conversations I had with the attendees at these user conferences completely validated and strengthened that belief.

  1. It’s fun talking to our customers’ customers!

While attending user conferences takes a lot of time, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity that our customers granted me. The ability to see our customers present TeamSupport to their customers was very fun for me, and being able to interact with them and see the impact that our technology is making was an amazing experience.

I also took copious notes and came away with several new software feature ideas that will continue to improve TeamSupport and let us help our customers achieve better communication with their customers.

Sometimes I get tied up in the day to day issues involved in running a software company, and being able to go out and talk with the people (our customers’ customers) that our software ends up helping was a broadening experience. I came back even more enthusiastic about making TeamSupport the best customer support product for software and technology companies!

Your partner in service,

Robert C. Johnson

CEO of TeamSupport

 

Get Started Today

TeamSupport, one of the top B2B customer service software systems on the market, is continually innovating new features to improve team collaboration and customer support. Sign up for a free, no-obligation demo today! 

Did you like this article? Here are some other recent articles you might enjoy: