Part 3: Ouch! Solve the pain caused by your current B2B customer support system.

Break down silos and build up communication among teams.

In today’s hyperconnected world of business, it’s hard to believe that silos still exist between departments. Sadly, they do. But with the right B2B (business-to-business) customer support software, it’s easy for support, sales, and product development teams to all have full visibility into the history of the customer, what products they are using, and what communication has occurred throughout the relationship. That way all of these departments can collaborate for a holistic approach to building solid customer relationships, taking your customer service department to a higher level and ensuring customer success.

We continue our four-part series about how a B2B customer support software solution like TeamSupport can help solve the many points associated with your current customer support system.  In Part 1 we addressed how to shorten the time to ticket resolution and in Part 2 helped you reduce churn. Here in Part 3, let’s break down silos.

TeamSupport was founded on the belief that customer service does not just come from the customer-facing service department, but rather from the entire company. In any technology company it is critical that the support group has a very tight relationship with the product development team as well as with the sales and marketing teams, both for resolving any issues and for getting customer feedback in the form of feature requests into the software. Yet the vast majority of software companies have one product (a help desk or issue tracking system) for the customer service group, and another product (a bug tracker or version control) for the software development team. And those departments have no way of communicating with each other, or worse, don’t see the value in that.

Here’s an example of what happens when silos exist: A contact from a B2B customer identifies a software problem. A service representative logs that into the issue tracking system and assigns it a case number. If the problem is one the customer service representative can solve within the department, it's taken care of according to a routine process.

On the other hand, if a customer reports a bug or has a new feature request, the process tends to fall apart when the ticket is exported from the help desk system into the bug tracking system, causing the original customer support agent to lose track of what happens next. In some cases, tickets related to bugs languish in the help desk system and are never addressed.

Either way, the customers are disconnected from their issue when it's shipped to another department or software. If they call into customer service, the representative can't provide any information about the problem because there is no visibility into the bug tracking system. This is frustrating for the customer not knowing when or if their issue will get resolved, and for the support agent who genuinely wants to provide good service and resolve (close) issues.

A B2B customer support software solution like TeamSupport breaks down these silos, integrating a robust help desk solution with a bug tracking solution so that the customer service and development teams (and others such as quality assurance [QA] and sales) use a common tool to create better products and happier customers. When information is visible to both support and sales, support teams are able to resolve issues faster, sales teams can be proactive in improving the customer's experience, and development can build products, updates, and enhancements that are relevant to their customers. More importantly it helps teams manage expectations with the customer about where an issue is in the process and when it will get resolved. 

This allows the entire company to build a holistic view of the customer, really understanding their needs, and reducing the time it takes to resolve their issues.

Sean from Arreva tells us, “One component that was missing from our previous support software was the ability for different departments to communicate. With teams in California, Arizona, and Florida TeamSupport has eliminated the distance and really improved not only customer support, but internal communication between support and sales in particular.”

Next, we’ll conclude our four-part series on solving pain points with the right B2B customer support software solution, Visual Support Tools.