Written by Alexander Yumashev, founder, and CEO of JitBit, a software company specializing in customer support tickets.
The Background
With digital technologies and omnichannel business presence, consumers are expecting flawless interaction with brands. But not only do they want to stay in touch with the latest updates, they also want to have the option to solve potential problems and issues. With 93% of customers likely to repeat their purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service, it’s clear that the quality of customer service is a major determinant of a company’s success. And otherwise, investing in a new customer is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
When it comes to different channels, email is king: 54% of customers use emails to communicate with brands. But the bigger the company, the more complex and unsustainable this method may become. Emails get lost and forgotten, prioritization has no clear pattern, and email distribution within team members gets chaotic. To solve these issues, companies have been increasingly turning towards software help desks that can bring order to the chaos. Converting emails to help desk tickets enables logging, managing, and tracking customer issues on a single screen, radically simplifying the user experience.
Robe, a hardware manufacturer, deals daily with complex issues not only related to products and production, but also to maintenance and control of their merchandise. To centralize customer service, Robe contracted JitBit, a company that provides a multifunctional customer service software. Apart from streamlining its communication with customers, this step proved to be an important investment in the company’s future.
The Problem
Robe faced frustrations coming from various team members relating to the limited functionality of the original customer service setup. With recurring “My emails are lost and I can’t search in them anymore” stories, the company has decided to move towards a new strategy. It aimed to move away from the email address based approach to seek greater functionality, while having several requirements in mind, including:
- Whole team awareness of all issues
- Even spread of load to all team members
- Substitutability while travelling or on sick leave
- Faster onboarding of team members
- Global storage, history and search
- Reportability and performance measurement
The Solution
When searching for a helpdesk solution, there is definitely a large number of possibilities. Most of the time, one tries to think of all possible use-cases and go for the “most complete” solution that offers as many features as possible. But Robe found that with a long list of features comes big complexity. At the end, the company decided to choose JitBit due to its convenient defaults and reasonable amount of settings but without outrageous configuration overheads.
With the philosophy preaching a powerful yet simple setup, JitBit provided Robe with a comprehensive solution. The versatile help desk empowered the team members while improving the user experience. With the automation enabling automatic replies, prioritization and tagging, setting due dates, and assigning responsible personnel, Robe let a breath of fresh air into its client service, allowing the help desk to become the true community hub of the company, consolidating all customer interactions and guiding the company towards better product development.
Beyond that, the JitBit HelpDesk also offered the possibility to integrate the setup into a larger ecosystem, ensuring effortless integrations. For example, Robe used the option of sending HTTP requests to third-party servers based on external inputs from their clients and integrated their internal information system into the HelpDesk via custom Javascript and CSS options. Last but not least, the company utilized the API to provide access to its research and development (R&D) section without compromising security. This additional layer of transparency, without sacrificing clarity, proved extremely valuable.
Overall, Robe particularly appreciated the centralized support system, which ensures that the whole support team is always fully up to date with all that’s happening and allows to bring the feedback data back to the company’s R&D. This also allows for a smoother transition between technicians on the company’s and the customer’s side: As the history remains in the help desk, a support request can be solved much faster by looking into the history or into the well maintained Knowledge Base. In addition to that, the reporting metrics of JitBit HelpDesk also shows customer searches and activity across the platform, giving direction for potential improvements to the company’s support, training, and products.
However, the implementation didn’t come without challenges. While the setup was very easy and the testing took about two months, the long-term challenge was educating the customers to stop emailing the technicians directly, but rather to use the global support address. But luckily, even for situations like these, the HelpDesk provides tools to move any email into the platform and turn it into a support ticket, making sure that all interactions are kept in one place.
The Results
The JitBit HelpDesk installed in place has provided the following value for Robe:
Tangible Improvements. The response time has improved dramatically as the “forgotten email” problem in mailboxes disappeared. The performance is now leveled up for all members of the team. The platform also encourages collaboration between the members of the support team, R&D team and the sales team. Robe appreciated being able to respond faster, more accurately and more completely, without having to go back and forth, resulting in the customers actually spending less time interacting between different people from various departments.
Constant Support. While initially, Robe didn’t need any particular attention from the JitBit team. However, several months after the deployment, the company committed a major user mistake which erased some of the data. The JitBit team has helped them to recover the data, even though it was outside the contract. This has consolidated the relationship further, with this experience showing that Robe support system has a great support team behind it. Therefore, the responsiveness and can-do approached turned out to be the signature features of the whole collaboration.
Long-term Value. Although at this point, Robe doesn’t utilize the Ideas forum, the company is carefully observing what needs their customers are expressing and how these needs and ideas can be implemented into both existing and future products. Based on the feedback collected through the JitBit HelpDesk, the company actually implemented several software and hardware features, for example custom modes for device control or custom glass inserts and filters. Thanks to the tagging system of the help desk, the company can mark, categorize, and collate customer requirements. Not only does this allow Robe to locate popular requests easily, it also establishes an environment of clarity and efficiency.
About JitBit
Jitbit is a small, friendly & self-funded software company founded in the UK by two guys with customer-support background in 2005. With its presence now in several countries, including the US, UK, and Latvia, Jitbit aims to make the world a better place by building helpdesk software that does not suck. The flagship product is “Jitbit Helpdesk” which is a helpdesk ticketing system. The product comes both as a “SaaS” solution available on the web on-demand, and an “on-premise” version that can be installed on customer’s servers. It features tight email integration, file-attachments, Google-drive integration, knowledge-base and everything a modern helpdesk app needs.
Disclosure: This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company
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