Getting Connected With
Customer Success

Upon starting his new role, Toone experience a unique set of challenges. Customers were complaining that support was poor, it took too long to get things done, and they weren’t getting replies. With their previous system, Toone felt he didn’t have his “finger on the pulse of what was happening at the customer level,” as he described it.

Specifically, Toone and his team needed to be able to generate a list of customers and found that impossible to do. He also wanted to view support activities in near-real time and route support updates to multiple parties, but the systems he used and reviewed often took a full day to update. Worse, they weren’t able to notify multiple parties when updates were made.

On the integrations side, the support software the company used previously sent tickets into their Salesforce CRM as activities or chatter feed, which didn’t make sense in the context of eSyncTraining’s support workflow. Similarly, the Jira integration was unusable since it only allowed for one project for the entire company and all of their products are tied to individual Jira projects. The search function on the incumbent solution was equally ineffective, often returning an empty search page unless agents typed in the company name exactly.

Reporting was another pain point: eSyncTraining’s support team needed reports that generated usable data or insights, and the other support software options the team explored didn’t cut it. Toone was forced to manually generate reports for the offshore development group, and send them outside the ticket system each night since the old support software didn’t provide an automated option.

Further, eSyncTraining needed a way to manage custom service level agreements (SLAs) because some of their customers had special arrangements. With the old support software, there was only one standard SLA and no customization options.

 Finally, the support provided to eSyncTraining by their old help desk solution was “terrible”, only providing assistance via email and at inconvenient hours.

After reviewing a variety of software solutions and finding none that fully addressed their needs, Toone found TeamSupport almost by accident. As he reviewed TeamSupport’s customer support software features, it quickly became apparent that TeamSupport, built by customer support experts for B2B (Business to Business) companies, was exactly the solution eSyncTraining had been looking for.

“The system does everything we need to engage and support our customers. I vetted quite a few ticketing systems, and none of them came close to TeamSupport,” Toone recalled.

Response times have improved drastically in a short period of time thanks to TeamSupport’s robust and customisable SLA feature, and customers have noticed the speed of replies getting much better. The support manager used to get calls from customers daily, but since implementing TeamSupport he’s gone 4 or 5 weeks without any calls because customers are being updated faster and more effectively.

An unexpected benefit with TeamSupport has been the dynamic ticket page rather than just the standard subject line, body, and maybe an attachment found in other systems. The ability to create custom properties and conditional custom fields that agents can use to collect vital information like product line, specific product details, and other background data is a game-changer.

“We can capture all that information as it comes in, and then we’ve got the actions in the background saying if it was XYZ LTI then associate this product and this Jira number with it, so if we have to escalate all we have to do is click a button," explained Toone. 

Toone loves how easy it was to set up without having to do custom development or use an API, “it’s so easy to set up I do it in my spare time.” Previously, eSyncTraining found that they wasted a lot of time going back and forth with customers, trying to figure out the steps to recreate an issue. This could easily take days and resulted in unhappy customers and frustrated agents – a poor situation all around. TeamSupport eliminates this back and forth so that the support team can hit the ground running, resulting in much faster ticket resolution times. The company saw several immediate benefits:

• Customers love the system because they can view and comment on colleagues’ tickets, and they also receive notifications when any ticket is updated. Through the Customer Hub, they are able to see company wide tickets, access the Knowledge Base, and view release notes by product.
• Using the old system, eSyncTraining’s support team had been very frustrated and had a hard time finding information and trying to update customers. “TeamSupport makes it so much easier,” Toone notes, “We’re actually providing the information our customers are looking for. The information is easy to find, and it makes sense.” The support team is also a big fan of the ability to create knowledge base articles instantly using comments from individual tickets, which continuously improves their self-service options.
• TeamSupport's robust integration with Jira allows eSyncTraining to to associate all of their products with unique Jira projects. Syncing information between TeamSupport and their Salesforce CRM is equally seamless, and all of their departments now have better visibility into customer relationships.
• Automated, scheduled reports deliver meaningful data that Toone can run by customer, product and version, or even by partner. Rather than having to manually build and send a list of Jira tickets to their offshore development team, Toone uses automated reports to do that for him.
• Handling custom SLAs is simple in TeamSupport since eSyncTraining can now tie specific customer accounts to custom SLA rules and thus ensure agents resolve issues within the specified timeframes. One of these customers immediately noticed the difference, complimenting the eSyncTraining support team for providing updates in record time.
• eSyncTraining made use of TeamSupport’s built-in import tool, bringing in all customer information including old tickets and partner relationships, and making the switch much easier. They are also making use of Parent Companies to manage their partner relationships, and Product Lines and Versions help streamline customer care and maximize the benefits of Ticket Automation.

Another favorite of the eSyncTraining support team is TeamSupport’s CDI (Customer Distress Index). This allows Toone to see quickly and easily which customers are getting upset, and reach out before they call to assure them the team is working on it. This unique tool is a “fantastic little feature” that he uses to provide proactive support and enhance the customer experience.

The eSyncTraining team has always been focused on providing excellent support, but it was difficult to provide that without the context, organization, and collaboration they needed to solve customer issues.

After trying and reviewing a range of support options that only addressed a portion of their pain points, eSyncTraining found TeamSupport, which meets 100% of their requirements. That means support agents, managers, developers, and even sales can easily work together to keep customers happy — and that keeps the eSyncTraining team happy too.

"It's actually fun using TeamSupport. It's laid out in a way that makes sense, like it was designed by support people who were sick of support systems and just happened to know how to code." Nick Toone, Director of Customer Success