“Good, Better, Best. Never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better, best." That’s the mantra of the Desk.com customer support team (called the WOW team). We continually try to improve the way we work, and make smart choices that help us be more efficient, and offer an even better customer experience.

With this mantra in mind we, as a team, decided we would undertake a few DIY improvements to turn our “Better” into our “Best.”

For our first area of self improvement, we decided to improve how we log phone calls. Logging them seems like a no-brainer; however, we often find ourselves distracted after a call, and sometimes fail to get around to making a record of the conversation we had just had with our customer.

Now, we can WOW our customers more than ever when they call us, because we have a full history of our interactions. It also means that any agent can pick up the conversation if a customer follows up. Customers appreciate this seamless experience, rather than having to repeat themselves again and again.

Along with this small bit of due diligence, we decided to revamp the way our phones work. A couple of small changes later, our call flow now allows people to hold as long as they want without being forced to leave a voicemail. Although our average wait time increased a minimal amount of ~3 mins (because we gave customers the option to hold) our answer rate rocketed, meaning our customer got the help they needed on the first contact with us.

We also did some analysis on the different types of cases we receive. We already had a Custom Field for Agents to select “Issue Type,” but our initial analysis showed that 60% of cases were categorized under “Education." Which didn’t give us enough insight to provide detailed help to our customers. After a little bit of spring cleaning, we came up with a new set of “Issue Categories” that have given us better insights into our customers’ most common issues. Gaining this insight means we can now present these to our product development team, can directly address them in future updates. In the long run, this means fewer cases for us and more time to focus on our next set of ideas.

What are these next ‘set of ideas’? As a team, we decided to dedicate 1 to 2 hours of our time, every day, to work on side projects that directly benefit our customers and the team as a whole. These include writing additional articles, which cover topics that customers often request, recording screencasts for some of our more complicated features, and working with some of our great integration partners to help increase our productivity and improve our workflow. This off-the-grid time has helped push some of the “forgotten” tasks that get lost in the daily rush to offer the best service to our customers. We have to remember that everything we do, is to help us be the customer champions and this allotted time has helped fill in any gaps that can often go unloved or neglected during the support process. In turn, this helped take us one step closer to turning our “better” into our “best."

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