We are making some important changes to our support process. Providing timely and helpful support is a key goal for the team at Clear Books.

One customer recently summed up our support saying, “sometimes you guys are awesome and respond instantly and sometimes you don’t”. Our goal is to be awesome all the time.

Currently we have a number of support channels:

  • Get Satisfaction for community support
  • Zendesk for support tickets
  • Task management system for our developers
  • Help guides
  • FAQ

This is disjointed so we are centralising our support process so that instead:

  1. You will create a ticket from within the system.
  2. We will auto suggest answers from our FAQ and help guides to resolve common queries.
  3. If you can’t find the answer you will then proceed to submit a ticket.

No more Get Satisfaction. No more Zendesk.

Behind the scenes the new system allows us to more easily allocate questions to support and problems to developers. The support team will be dealing with tickets in one central place rather than multiple places. We will know immediately who you are, what your account is and any tickets you have raised previously. It won’t be necessary to sign up or log into different support systems. We will also have more control over reporting and the internal goals we set ourselves to ensure we keep improving.

 

Posted by Tim Fouracre

Tim founded Clear Books in 2008. Like many small business owners he worked from home for 15 months to get his startup off the ground. Today Tim enjoys helping Clear Books, its customers and its growing team innovate and achieve. Tim did his GCE O Levels in Ghana.

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8 Comments

  1. Will 18th October 2011 at 5:21 pm

    I’m aware it’s costly, but you may well have noticed that Sage now offer a new sme package around the same monthly cost but with 24/7 telephone support. I’ve no intention of switching, but surely this is an important area to compete in?

  2. Tim Fouracre 19th October 2011 at 6:41 am

    @Stephen

    Yep – we don’t want to lose the community spirit either. We love having a place where ideas are shared between users and voted on so the good news is we will be providing this!

    We just want to make the distinction between it being an ideas/feedback area as opposed to a support channel.

  3. Tim Fouracre 19th October 2011 at 6:52 am

    @Will

    We hold our hands up to the mistakes we’ve made with telephone support. We’ve had to alter our approach as the business has grown.

    In the beginning we had telephone support, but as we grew we found it was not as efficient as ticket support. It was taking up too much time for one question or problem.

    So we introduced a premium rate support number to try and throttle the queries to only those that were necessary.

    The premium rate number went down like a lead balloon so we dropped the telephone support completely.

    Once our new support systems are fully operational we will see how much more efficient it is and then revisit our options for telephone support.

  4. Tim Fouracre 19th October 2011 at 12:05 pm

    @Perry

    Yes you will be able to fire off an email. There are no plans to stop that.

    However, if you are logged into Clear Books then you won’t need to go to a separate support system. Simply click on the Help link in the menu and you will now be presented with a new ‘Ask Question / Report Problem’ form.

  5. Guy 20th October 2011 at 3:47 pm

    Hi
    What is going to happen to all the out standing issues that are still in Get Satisfaction?Support for Get Satisfaction has gone down hill rapidly, you started off by answering question very quickly now they sit round for days or even a week.Where will all this be launched?Guy

  6. Tim Fouracre 20th October 2011 at 4:00 pm

    @Guy

    It’s true that response times have deteriorated on Get Satisfaction and that is one of the catalysts for making these changes. With one central support system we won’t have to hop from one system to the other, never knowing what to prioritise, as we do at the moment (i.e. Zendesk, Get Satisfaction, Bug Tracking).

    New queries are already slowing rapidly on Get Satisfaction. We will continue to answer and/or migrate questions over to our new system.

  7. Tim Fouracre 4th November 2011 at 7:54 pm

    @Adam

    The main benefit is that we will have a lot more control over the ticket. With Get Satisfaction we can’t assign to a support agent, we can’t easily identify tickets that aren’t actually solved, we have no way of manipulating all the ideas we receive from you guys internally. The list goes on.

    Tickets created will identify immediately the page you raised the ticket from. This will help us know immediately which page you were having problems on.

    I guess the proof will be in the pudding but I do believe this is the right move in the long term. The more feedback we have control over, the better we can deal with it.

  8. Tim Fouracre 10th November 2011 at 12:10 pm

    @Millie

    Not yet but that is in the pipeline.

Comments are closed.