Here at Teamwork.com, we’ll be celebrating our 10-year anniversary very soon.  We’re proud to say we still have some of the original users from back in the days when the company was just a couple of guys in a tiny office with nothing but a love of code and bad highlights in common.

Good customer support has always been the core of our business, so much so that we developed our own help desk software to make sure we built the strongest system possible.We’re often asked how we use Teamwork Desk to manage support, so while the developers put the finishing touches on a couple of features, we’re going to give you some insights into how we use Teamwork Desk’s features to provide excellent customer support.

First, a little bit of context. We have 16 people in our support team offering 24/7 customer support, and every day someone from another department works for a day in support to learn more about our customers and how they use our products.

We average at about 8,000 tickets monthly across our three products: Teamwork Projects, Teamwork Desk and Teamwork Chat. This excludes marketing/sales and employment queries. Our average response time per ticket is 14 minutes, and our happiness rating was 98% at the time this post was published.

As a small team, handling support was definitely easier. We successfully used another helpdesk tool to manage our tickets when the team consisted of just three of us. However, as the team grew and our customer base expanded, so did our need to put a more formal process in place. There are some core features in Teamwork Desk that have been central to getting this process right.

A typical workday for each support team member begins by checking the unified inbox. For anyone who doesn’t know, the unified inbox is an amalgamation of all the inboxes that are funneled through Teamwork Desk. The golden rule of working from the unified inbox is that if you open the ticket, you own it.

After each ticket has been dealt with, we apply a status to it–this could be closed, on-hold or waiting on customer. The ticket history helps us get to know our users a bit better and understand how they use our products or what kind of questions they’ve had previously. It also stands to help us personalize our responses so we make sure we’re in touch with customer needs.

If a support agent needs input from other members of the team, they can simply add a note to the ticket or assign it to the person in question, who will then be notified. This process gives the development and the support teams the opportunity to constantly connect. We use tags or ticket priorities if something is urgent or requires extra attention, and collision detection helps us save time by cutting down on the incidents when agents accidentally double up on ticket replies. As tasks arise out of tickets (these might be feature requests, bug fixes, video requests, etc.) we use the integration with Teamwork Projects to create tasks straight from the ticket that we’re working on. It’s very important to us that each ticket is handled as efficiently as possible and that each customer has a positive experience. The current process that we’ve developed  along with our amazing support team helps us achieve just that.

After each customer query has been solved, we look for a happiness rating from our customers. The rating is a very reliable indicator of the quality of service we provide, and it provides the chance to confirm that our efforts are meeting customer needs. This final evaluation has proven to be one of the most used-features of the app for our team. No matter how amazing you believe your product or service is, your business will be nothing if your customers complain about the interactions with your company. A commitment to placing customer support first goes beyond good intentions. Getting your customer support process right will help make your company more effective–and keep customer satisfaction high. We’d love to hear more about your experiences with Teamwork Desk and how it has helped you with your customer support.