How to Support the Support Team

Support is defined as follows –> “to bear all or part of the weight” or “enable to function or act”.

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If your support team has ever saved you from a rock and a hard place, then you know the definition is completely true. While we genuinely value the help that our support teams offer, few companies actually take the steps to streamline their support programs in tangible ways.

It begs the question – who supports the support team?

The Venn diagram that represents the overlap between customer success and support teams is increasingly becoming less of a Venn diagram and more of a circle. But it goes further than that. Support teams also ensure employee success, co-worker success, and new hire success.

Think about it like this – do your co-workers currently believe that their support-related problems are tickets? Maybe not – but they definitely should! When a colleague interrupts the workflow of a support team member to ask a question, they’ve slowed the company response time to an unhappy buyer or delayed the customer ticket resolution time. All too often, co-workers think of these questions as conversations. But they’re tickets and should be treated as such.

There are several tools, integrations, and bots that can make ticket tracking life easier for your support team. More importantly, doing so can increase the company throughput time that transitions unhappy customers to happy, returning customers. Simply creating a standard for repetitive internal tasks or organizing said tasks within one single platform can wildly change the flow of support-related tickets.

Here’s an easy example – record your conversations permanently on a singular platform, then their public presence will prevent similar questions from disrupting the valuable time of a support team member. If you answer a question in a public Slack channel, then everyone has access to their information.

To reword that previous sentence, do not use Slack DMs to ask the support team questions. After all, Slack is an acronym that stands for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.

As many companies have multiple support shifts, it’s vital that information flows easily between each shift. When the night shift comes in for work, they should be able to access publicly available information and already know exactly what to accomplish during their time at work. They should also know what’s already been handled.

Tickets, issues, and a public space for this information all help employees understand how to be of service. Otherwise, certain tickets won’t get resolved until next Monday.

At Nextup, our work make the management of a support team simple and painless.

Here’s how our Slack integration works:

1. An employee needs help from IT, Security, HR, Facilities, or other teams.
2. The employee contacts your team on your messaging platform.
3. The message is used to create a support request with a simple click.
4. The team communicates to gather further information and resolve the issue.
5. Activity is synchronized automatically to your back-end system.
6. Outcomes are improved and metric accuracy increases.

Why is this helpful?

1. It allows teams to help customers quickly
2. Sharing updates in searchable channels removes repetition
3. It escalates tricky situations quickly and efficiently
4. It makes finding product knowledge and solutions to customer issues easier for your team.

It seems like we ask our support team to take on new platforms for communication almost every quarter – onsite chat, email, ticketing systems, phone calls, twitter complaints, and Slack channels. With support teams juggling all of these, it’s no wonder they’re busy.

Simple changes like a new Slack integration alleviate some of this juggling. If your whole team is already living out of Slack, then using Slack to get support feels frictionless for colleagues and co-workers. Adapt to what already feels natural rather than forcing something new on your team. Slack Integrations are the grease on the wheel.

After all, the whole purpose of Slack is to increase your team’s responsiveness. Responsiveness is pretty much exactly what customer support is about. At Nextup, we remove context-switching. We remove prompts to log in. For IT teams, we ensure there is not an additional maintenance burden. At Nextup, we increase responsiveness so much that now it’s literally as easy as clicking a single button to create a support ticket.

It quite literally does not get simpler than this.

Have any questions for us? Reach out and see how supportive our customer support team is.

Nextup.ai’s HelpDesk+ is support for support teams.