Managing Customer Support in a Startup: A solution.
The problem
Companies nowadays have multiple points of contact (help@, info@, support@, Twitter DMs, Facebook messages, SMS…)
Managing them can turn into a painful task, and unreplied requests give way to frustrated, bad-reviewing customers.
Let’s talk about how people can deal with customer support.
Shared email accounts
It is the most simple yet most inefficient way to deal with customer support. The premise is quite simple, set up an email account, support@ for example, and share the password with your coworkers.
Everyone has access to all emails, which might seem like a good, easy option, but it entails problems.
- Sharing passwords is a terrible security practice.
- Emails can be answered twice by different people.
- There’s no accountability.
- Impossible to scale.
Help desk
It is undoubtedly a step up from sharing email accounts; it turns emails into tickets, which can help you prioritize, and assign cases to the right people.
But just like sharing email accounts, it has downsides.
- They are complex to set up.
- They create a new silo of communications, meaning you will have both emails and tickets to monitor in some cases.
- It will be one more tool your team has to learn how to use.
- They use impersonal ticket numbers and auto-responses.
Help desks often offer a myriad of add-ons that quickly add up to an expensive monthly burden.
The solution
It brings the best of both worlds.
Secure inbox sharing that allows you to monitor, assign, prioritize, and categorize support requests.
It doesn’t add one more tool in your arsenal; it replaces one you already use: your email client. It doesn’t create a new silo of isolated data. You can work on your personal/business emails, your shared inbox emails, and you will have all your team internal chat. It’s magical.
Here are a few features that will help you manage customer support:
