Revolutionize your Business with Customer Support in the Cloud

Yendo isn’t the only cloud based application that can dramatically improve your business. From our own experience and the feedback we get from our customers it’s clear that there are several other areas of your business that could benefit from moving to the cloud.

Much has been written about moving CRM to the cloud so instead we want to focus on what we think is the next big area to go online; customer support. While this may seem mundane at first it is in fact the core of any business – keeping your existing customers happy.

So what are the options? Well we have looked at a few in Yendo and there seem to be three serious options; ZenDesk, GetSatisfaction and Assistly.

Assistly is probably the most comprehensive customer support solution of all the options and we thought it would be good to look a little bit closer at how to set it up and use it. It’s also worth noting that the first user in Assistly is completely FREE, which is a real bonus for small businesses.

Just like Yendo, you can start setting up Assistly directly from within Google Apps (or signup directly).  There’s a three step wizard to get going which overall is very easy. The most important part is the third step which links Assistly with your Facebook and Twitter accounts:

Linking to email, Twitter and Facebook is probably the biggest advantage of using a system like this over Excel or older software. It lets you respond to your customers however thay choose to contact you. No more logging into Facebook and Twitter separately to check for comments, all of this is now available within Assistly. We quickly found that we stopped using TweetDeck in favour of Assistly, it’s so much easier to have it all in one place.

In a discussion with Matt Trifiro, Senior VP of Marketing for Assistly, he explained that;

“The world is ever more social, and customers are reaching out to companies in lots of new ways. Gone are the days of just email and phone. Now customers are talking to companies (and each other) on lots of channels—Twitter, Facebook, live chat, forums, through community Q&A—and more every day. How can businesses keep up with this massive demand, and still deliver the customer support that becomes a differentiating business strategy? That’s where we see Assistly playing a critical role—coping with the extraordinary demands of customer support in a shrinking and highly competitive world.”

Another, perhaps unique, feature of Assistly is that it allows you to create logins for temporary or part-time staff. As your business grows (or occassionally shrinks) you can change the number of users you have on the Assistly system and pay by the hour, not by the month.

In our discussion with Matt, he went on to add;

“One of the most exciting innovations in the customer support market is the evolution of simpler business models that make it easier for businesses of all sizes to get access to great tools. In July, Assistly moved from a tiered pricing program to a simple  method that expands or contracts seamlessly based entirely on business demand and provides a free Full-Time Agent seat to every account. Seasonal uptick? Add a few Flex Agents for $1 per hour—just for the busy season. We came to believe that a streamlined system of “use what you need; pay as you go” is the ideal solution for progressive businesses.”

Within the system itself everything is driven by a fairly easy to understand dashboard screen. It lists each open ‘case’ for your organisation and lets you make updates as needed. It blends together all activity from emails, Facebook and Twitter into one ‘stream’. Each can be responded to directly within the dashboard.

This dashboard hides a lot of very intelligent functionality underneath. Behind the scenes in Assistly it applies rules that you can pre-configure to each customer comment/enquiry. It takes a little time to fully configure but once it’s up and running it’s amazing how much time this will save you. These ‘macros’ let you do things like send a preset reply, update the case status and categorise the case, all in one button press.

We have certainly found that ‘modern’ helpdesk software has become an essential tool for doing business. Here in Yendo we use it and we would advise all of our customers to at least try it out. It will save you both time and money.

In closing here is one last quote from Matt who echoes something we have been saying here in Yendo for a while:

“Small businesses now live in an environment where a couple of college kids in their mom’s basement can be serious competitors to larger, established businesses. We see a major restructuring of the competitive landscape as progressive companies vie to service the new global, social, mobile customers of today.”