How Slack helped us sync the team with support calls

At Toky we are a distributed team. We work from Mexico, Paraguay and Brazil and we cover 3 different timezones to serve perfectly well people living in the Americas, and most of Europe.

This distribution is making us take calls long before I wake up, and long after everyone leaves office. For example, our people in Brazil are the firsts to rise and here in Mexico, we are the last to leave. Brazil serves part of Europe, here we serve parts of LatAm and the west coast of the United States and Canada.

We cover more than 12 hours between our three locations.

How Slack is helping us

Using our Slack integration we have been able to keep the team in synchrony about what the support calls received were about.

When I wake up in the morning and I check the #toky channel in Slack, I immediately see if anyone called, who answered the call and what the call was about. This way, with a 10 seconds look I am able to summarize myself everything that happened before I started working.

The same story is true for our guys in Paraguay and Brazil. They leave office 4 or 5 hours before me and the next morning, they do the same procedure to see what happened while they were away.

There should be a better solution

Yes, I am sure there is, but with the volume of calls we are receiving and with the size of our team, this has been a very satisfactory and hassle free solution.

A lot of small teams using calls as a mean for support and sales, are probably under the same circumstance. They don’t need a huge machinery to keep the team up to date.

Automatically creating a ticket in Zendesk, Desk, FreshDesk, etc. for every received/placed call is what we have in our roadmap as the next major feature release. By mid January it should be ready and we’ll see which of these two turned out to be the most cost-effective solution for us.

Originally published at blog.toky.co on December 14, 2015.