How we do incredible customer support (and run a support help desk)
Highrise customer support is incredible. Really incredible.
We often get questions on the ‘best’ way to use Highrise or how we use it. What are our secrets? We’ll start sharing some of them.
While we use it in many ways these days (spoiler alert — more of these coming in upcoming posts!), one of our most frequent and ever ongoing uses is as our customer support inbox. Here’s how that works for us:
- The help form on our website sends an email to our gmail account: support@highrisehq.com
- We added a separate ‘Support’ user in Highrise associated with our support@highrisehq.com email address:
- We set up gmail autoforwarding using the ‘Support’ dropbox (now exposed on the users page) to get the messages into Highrise:
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Messages come into Good Morning:
where we use presence to determine which emails to respond to and which to leave alone when our teammate already has an answer:
We use a shared email connection to have responses come from support@highrisehq.com instead of our individual Highrise emails. This way replies back also come directly into Highrise for all to see.
We use templates to store and provide starting points for common (and also less frequent) support queries:
If we don’t have an existing template, we’ll search notes to find previous responses and examples:
We use cases to track high level issues (by filing an email to a particular case). We don’t file all of our cases, but those that we feel have some significance.
We share comments with the team for those tickets that need some form of discussion. We draft responses or call attention to someone else on a particular ticket:
If a question cannot be answered right away, we create a task as a reminder to follow up with a customer once an answer is ready.
We also use tasks to assign API and technical tickets to our engineers. This helps get more of the team chatting with our customers and using Highrise, which is a great bonus.
Using Highrise as our help desk has greatly increased the amount of time we spend in Highrise every day and directly contributed to many of the feature enhancements we referred to above. We hope you’re enjoying them as much as we are!
And here’s a non-tool tip on support: Don’t be so fast to close your support cases.
At the end of our support cases we try to ask open ended questions like “Does that help?” To make sure we did indeed help or leave it open for additional clarification.
We don’t track metrics like how many questions are answered in a day or hour because some of our best insights come from subsequent conversations and deeper questions about why. We may suggest possible alternative ideas or other popular feature requests (i.e. possibly something we’re currently working on).
So if we start asking you more questions than you expected in a support request, now you know why :). Chris Gallo, our head of support wrote a great blog post awhile back on this topic. We also posted a longer version of all the tools we use for our Support in a guest blog post with Jotform.