The Support Journey through the Eyes of the Customer: Our Experience with Pipedrive

Do you ever wonder what your support journey looks like to a customer? Even if you have all the right tools in place, there might be little gaps in it that can cause frustration and friction to your customer without you realizing it.

The best way to evaluate your customer experience throughout the support journey and identify areas of improvement at every touchpoint is to put yourself in the shoes of your customer.

To illustrate how a support process might look like through their eyes, we’ll break down the support journey of Pipedrive, a software company providing Sales CRM & Pipeline Management solutions, the way we experienced it. We’ll go a step further and provide ideas for reducing back-and-forth, improving satisfaction rates, and delighting your customers.

Pipedrive’s support journey through our eyes

It all started with “We need a sales CRM software to optimize our pipeline”. Rare are the customers who know exactly what they are looking for but we’re one of them. We wanted a one-stop, customizable, mobile-friendly, easy-to-navigate sales hub offering a full synchronization between our email conversations within the CRM and our email provider.

Based on those criteria we shortlisted three providers of SaaS sales CRM tools including Pipedrive. We signed up for a standard 7-day trial with all of them. And the evaluation began.

While we had a very smooth experience with the other two providers, we ran into an issue with Pipedrive.

As our team was testing the email synchronization feature, Alex, our CEO, accidentally synced the full content of his inbox with the CRM instead of only the sales-related emails. He tried to reverse the action and do proper email sync, however, the system was not allowing him to do so. The first thing he did was to try to resolve the issue himself. He looked into the Pipedrive’s FAQ section.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t find any information available related to his problem. So he had no other choice but to reach out to the customer support team. He clicked “Talk to Us” and a pop-up window opened to their live chat. The second touchpoint with the customer support desk. Alex briefly explained his problem to the support agent. The support agent responded within 20 minutes with a link to the how-to-videos and interactive webinars.

Alex further explained that the issue is very specific and there’s no info on the self-service content page. The agent requested screenshots and short explanation via e-mail to better understand the situation.

Eventually, Pipedrive team identified a bug in the system, deleted our account and register us once again for a free trial. The problem was solved.

Even though the time to resolution took 6 days and a chain of over 10 emails, our team purchased Pipedrive’s sales CRM software. That might sound counterintuitive at first but the reason is simple: the responsiveness, the engagement of the whole team, the friendly tone, and the desire of the support team to identify and solve the issue won us over.

Pipedrive created a seamless customer journey thanks to investing in the following:

• Live Support Tools: We didn’t lose time googling or searching through their webpage for their contact details. With zero hassle, we reached them immediately through their live chat platform.
• Training: The support agents were very well-trained. The issue might have not been clear from the beginning but the team promptly kept on updating us on its resolution status. They were patient, kept the positive tone, and made clever use of emojis which lightened up the conversation.
• Well-organized T1 support: With an average reply time of 4 hrs time across all industries for all support tickets, it took only 20 minutes for Pipedrive’s team to get back to us. With only 7 days to evaluate the product, a quick response time all the way from the first contact to resolution has been of great value to us.
• Support engineers: Our request was not common and it was beyond the scope of the support team’s knowledge. However, thanks to the support engineers the issue was solved without us even noticing their intervention in the process.

Overall, we felt appreciated and valued as a customer and that was one of the major reason we chose them over the other two providers.

In times when products have identical features to address one and the same need, it’s not the price but the experiences and customer satisfaction companies provide that matter.

The only downside was the multiple emails we had to exchange with the team which led to longer resolution time than expected.

But was there a way to avoid that?

Fewer explanations, more understanding

Speed and friendliness are important aspects of the customer experience. However, customers wish the people on the other end could see their issue without explaining it over and over again. Unfamiliar with the concept of waiting, customers want their problems solved now with minimum effort from their side.

Thanks to co-browsing solutions like Sessionstack support agents can now have all the information they need to understand the customer issue right after their first “hello”. The support team can immediately see and interact with the customer’s browser in real-time without the need of installing any additional software. They could spot the problem, document it and if possible solve it instantly. They can guide the customers or take full control over their browser when needed.

In the case of Pipedrive with the help of a co-browsing solution, they could have immediately started a co-browsing session through their live chat with us to see exactly what the problem was. With the issue being clear from the beginning the chain of emails might have been eliminated or at least significantly reduced. Not only that, a Forrester’s survey shows that support via co-browsing results in higher customer satisfaction (78%) than phone help (74%), chat help (69%) or email (54%).

Adding a co-browsing solution to your support platform can make your customers feel understood without them saying a word. This will make the whole experience effortless and personal for them. Don’t be surprised if you see an immediate change in customer satisfaction metrics (NPS, CSAT).

More context, less back-and-forth

However, not always seeing exactly what the user did leads to a resolved issue the first time the customer and the agent chat. In most customer journeys, context is missing.

In the case of Pipedrive, our email synchronization problem was not in the scope of the support team. Technical-specific problems or bugs, require the help of the dev team. In order to solve them, they need to know how to troubleshoot properly and locate the problem. Often their source of information is customer emails with screenshots attached to them which in some cases lack context. When the issue is not clear, the customer support team needs to contact the customer again, wait for them to respond, forward the information they received to the dev team, get their feedback and send it back to the customer. If the problem is solved, great! But if not, the team has to do the same thing once again. It would be great to eliminate the back-and-forth communication and deliver a smoothness experience for your customers, right?

With the help of solutions like SessionStack, you can not only see and interact with the customers’ browsers but also record the customer session and share it with the appropriate team members when needed. Instead of lengthy emails with multiple screenshots attached to them, your team gets a video they can replay to see the steps the user took that lead to the issue with each error and its severity automatically highlighted during the session.

With just a bit of context, your team can cut the back-and-forth communication, reduce the time to resolution and improve the whole customer experience.

Conclusion

With customers seeking better customer experiences, take the time to investigate your customer support journey, map down your touchpoints and see what works and where you can improve your process. Hope the examples above will give you some direction on how you can improve your support journey.

SessionStack lets you see everything that happens in the customer’s browser and help them throughout the support journey.

Curious to find out more? Explore SessionStack today.