Customer Support Software Featured Articles

The customer experience is a popular catchphrase in business circles these days. But what exactly does it mean? How can businesses best address CX? And what are some of the companies best positioned to help them do so?

Analytics, content management, cross-channel, loyalty, personalization, self-service, social, user experience, and voice of the customer technologies are best positioned to improve the customer experience, according to Gartner (News - Alert) analyst Ed Thompson, as quoted in a recent KMWorld article. The piece goes on to tell the story of how one particular company invested in such solutions in an effort to improve the customer experience and meet some other internal requirements.

Hospitality property management company Multi-Systems Inc. was ready to move on from its legacy customer support ticketing system, which it used in situations such as when a guest was charged the wrong rate. So it began a vendor search. In the end, it decided on TeamSupport, which offers a cloud-based solution. TeamSupport Enterprise allows organizations to holistically help customers by interconnecting support tickets in a way that provides businesses high-level visibility about customer interactions. The solution addresses customer self-service, email, live chat, ticket management, and can integrate with third-party applications.

TeamSupport’s solution allows Multi-Systems Inc. to associate ticketing issues with particular hotels (one of its criteria), and also can direct employees to knowledgebase articles to help them address customer problems (like how to adjust a customer bill if that bill is incorrect). The company was able to convert 2,000 of its customers to the TeamSupport solution in just three weeks, according to the piece.

As Robert C. Johnson, TeamSupport’s CEO, said in the January/February issue of CUSTOMER magazine, “We’re not your standard help desk software – we have very strategically and intentionally created a system that is designed for B2B companies with external-facing customer support. We understand how important customer service is to companies whose customers are also businesses, rather than individual consumers. If their software fails, their customers can’t operate properly.

“We understand the need to manage customers at a company level,” he added. “And we understand the value of collaboration. Most important of all, we are our customers. We are in the same business, we experience the same issues, and we walk the walk, putting our customers first every day because it’s called customer support – not ticket support.”