The Mambo foundation is a volunteer, non-profit organization charged with the governance of the Mambo open source content management system.  Mambo is free software released under the GNU/General Public license and like all such projects, dealing with emails and organizational issues takes valuable time away from software development.   They use Help Desk to manage both time and resources more effectively.

Mambo developers must work in collaboration from many different locations which makes email key to their communication.   “Email is the key communication tool. The Mambo development team and the members of the Board of the Mambo Foundation are geographically distributed and work in a virtual, online environment.  All email that is not addressed to individuals is managed through the help desk.”  Directing email traffic through a central ticketing system allows multiple members to work together on the same issue if it is not specifically addressed to a particular individual.

Mambo foundation uses the knowledgebase in ActiveCampaign’s Help Desk Software to provide a central location for corporate documents that require routine turn over.  “For the management of Board affairs Help Desk has proven to be an ideal solution.  Previously, corporate documents were kept by officers of the Foundation and handed over to new officers following our annual elections of the Board. This meant that record keeping relied on the diligence of the individuals who handled those documents. Help Desk is used as a central repository and archive. By keeping all documents in the knowledgebase and keeping emails we now have accurate corporate records that are available to future Board members. This gives us confidence that we can not only meet our statutory obligations but also that institutional knowledge is retained for the future – two things that are extremely important and sometimes difficult to achieve in a volunteer environment.”     This improves efficiency and allows accountability that would otherwise be difficult to maintain.

“Volunteer, free software projects tend to have a reasonably high turnover in personnel. People work when they can, in their spare time, and often find it hard to commit their time in advance. By having a central document repository and by handling all email through the ticketing system it does not matter who is around and when. People can come into new roles and read what has happened previously and people can take leave for a few months while knowing that others can step in and take over handling of the enquiries.

“In the past, individuals took responsibility for one or more email accounts. There was no way the rest of the team could be certain that emails were being responded to in a timely manner and no way the team or Board could be certain it was receiving all information. By collecting all emails within the help desk the groups collectively have access to each email and the responses. This has made us more accountable and has improved our responsiveness to enquiries.

“Prior to installing Help Desk we also had issues due to the distributed, virtual team environment we work in. Team and Board members are located all over the world and not everyone has reliable internet connections. Some countries have high fees for bandwidth. This resulted in some Board members being reluctant to take on responsibility for handling email enquiries due to costs – especially as a lot of the email is spam. By using the helpdesk nobody needs to worry about the costs because email goes into the ticket system and is not downloaded to individual’s computers. If someone’s internet connection is down for awhile this is not a problem – responding is a collective responsibility and no longer a burden put on individuals.

“The Mambo Foundation has used SupportTrio for nine months now. The improvements in our responsiveness and productivity have been significant. Best of all, we now have more time to devote to developing the software.”

SupportTrio provides a central framework to allow Mambo Foundation address the challenge of working in an environment that requires the collaboration of volunteers working in different locations.  It also provides a means for maintaining efficiency and accountability in an environment that necessitates a high turnover rate.

Click here for more information about ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software.

On Thursday I described how to successfully offer web-based support that your customers will love. But what if you’re the customer? Is there anything you can do to minimise your time investment and maximize your gains? As a matter of fact, there are a number of things you can do to ensure that you receive the best support that the company you’re working with has to offer.

• Be very descriptive.

Assume that your problem is unique, and offer up any and every piece of information you can think of that might help the help desk team solve your problem in one go. Chances are, the support team doesn’t actually want to give you any kind of runaround, or to keep your issue pending for days on end while they await further information from you.

I can’t tell you how many people have submitted frenzied tickets to our own support center begging for fast help getting their software back online, only to leave out any information about how we could actually access the software, or even what specific error they were seeing. You want quick help, and the support team you’re dealing with wants to give it to you; your job is to make sure they can do that for you.

• Keep it relevant.

If you need fast help getting your widgets working, this may not be the ideal time to explain how the widgets fit into your business model. Support staff are twitchy and tend to have ADHD–try not to distract them

• Take a moment to review the situation before you submit.

It can be very difficult to keep a cool head when you have an urgent issue that needs attention. But before you submit, take an extra few minutes to examine the problem, re-read your own support request, and make sure that you’ve included a clear, complete description of the problem and exactly what you have done to try and fix it.

Most web software support systems will knock you back to the end of the queue if you submit a second request, so the extra time you take before submitting could save you a great deal of waiting time later on. Also, when you’re feeling frustrated, it’s really just too easy to lose your head and forget about basic things. Ask yourself: Have I fully described the problem? Have I mentioned everything that happened in the time leading up to the problem? Have I provided everything that is needed to investigate the problem? Have I described everything I’ve done since the problem first occurred?

• Make sure the ticket gets submitted.

Some online support systems have extra steps before the ticket is submitted; make sure there are no more buttons to click or windows to scroll through. Most systems will tell you directly that your ticket has been submitted and even give you a ticket number. Most will also send you a confirmation e-mail.

• Make sure you know how you’ll be answered.

If you’re expecting an answer by e-mail, make sure you got a confirmation e-mail. It may also be a good idea to go ahead and whitelist the support address just to be sure. If you didn’t get an e-mail, check the company’s support web site. In our support area, like most, there is a page where you can view your open tickets to see their status and any replies.

Most of these tips come down to the very same things I talked about when explaining how to succeed in providing support. They’re based on the same principles you can use to succeed in just about any kind of communication: try to consider the other person’s perspective. Think about what they need, what they want, and what you can do to understand them. Your communication will always be more effective when you have a level view of the field and all the people involved. You’ll get more done, and will make people feel motivated to help you.

A lot of people wonder if they can really make web-based support work for their business. Will clients tolerate having to do everything online, waiting for replies to their tickets, wondering about the response time? Don’t people just want to talk to you on the phone?

When it comes right down to it, web-based support is often simply the most cost-effective and efficient way to assist your clients. But there are some things you’ll need to do to make sure that your online support center is convenient, friendly, and responsive from the client’s perspective.

1. Make it easy to find. If people can’t find the link to support on your web site, they’ll quickly assume you simply don’t offer online support. Soon they’ll be on the line with your salespeople demanding service, and getting more frustrated by the moment. It’s a bad situation, and one which can generally be avoided very easily by making sure your support center is highly visible. If you look at our main site, you’ll see that support is available right from the menu bar at the top of every page, and then again at the bottom of the sidebar. Don’t be afraid to put links in more than one location.
2. Make sure help is available quickly. Any frequently asked questions should be available on the site with no interaction necessary. Clients will appreciate knowing that any questions they have are probably already answered on your web site, so make sure to set up a knowledge base with in-depth answers, descriptions, and pictures to make sure everyone gets the message. If you’re using ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software, you can even set the software up to automatically search the knowledge base for relevant articles before each ticket is submitted. You can’t beat zero wait-time. Another great way to make your clients feel well-support is by offering live chat. Even if the only thing you can tell the client in chat is that “this is a complicated issue that we’ll have to look into through a support ticket,” they’ll feel better knowing that there is a reason they are waiting and that they have actually made contact with someone at your company. And live chat is far more efficient than phone support, as a single operator can handle more than just a single chat at a time.
3. Make sure your clients know what to expect. Make information about the length of your queue and the average response time readily available. There is nothing worse than submitting a support request and having no way to know whether it will be answered in one hour, or one month. So make a commitment to answer tickets within a given length of time, and stick to it.
4. Exceed expectations. It’s better to over-estimate your response time than to under-estimate it. No one ever got upset because the answer to their ticket came in 5 hours sooner than they had thought it would. In our own support center, for example, we promise a response from support within 1 business day. In practice, most tickets are answered within just a few hours. Be sure to pay attention to the newest tickets in your queue as well as the oldest. If someone you just responded to is asking for clarification, it’ll be much more valuable to them to get an answer in 2 minutes than it would have been for someone with a more complex support request to receive an answer 2 minutes sooner. You might also consider using a survey service to determine what areas your customers would most like to see improvement in.
5. Be friendly. Of course you want to maintain a level of professionalism in all of your communications with clients, but don’t be so corporate that people can’t understand you. Let people know that you empathize with their situation and genuinely want to help them. Don’t make people feel like they are lost in a bureaucracy; they will likely find solace in the arms of your competitors.

The main thing to remember is just to approach the situation from the client’s perspective. How would you want things to work if you were in their position? The idea is to offer them a support experience that, when all is said and done, will actually be better than what they could have had if they had reached you on the phone. The web is a truly robust medium for doing exactly that; you just have to put a little planning into designing the right type of experience.

Over the years, I’ve pitched an awful lot of people on the virtues of doing most of the support and troubleshooting for our software through e-mail. The argument goes like this: when it’s all done in writing, it makes it easier to spend the time necessary to examine what’s actually happening and try out various ways of isolating the problem’s cause and of fixing it. In this way, despite there being what seems like a significant time lag in the response to a given e-mail, issues actually get resolved more quickly and efficiently than they could have if everything had been done in real time.

There is, of course, a flipside to this, and that is that it can be surprisingly difficult to understand what is being said when there aren’t any attitudinal clues like vocal cadence and tonality. Even over the phone, it can be very challenging to understand each other without the benefit of facial expressions and physical gestures.

So, like any place that does a lot of communication through email and telephone, from time to time we have misunderstandings. Even the most understanding and amicable of our employees (which is me!) occasionally find themselves in the middle of an escalating misunderstanding.

What makes these occurrences interesting is the style of interaction that they induce: both sides feel vaguely threatened, and so the conversation morphs from a support situation into more of a contest. The person seeking help forgets that they’re trying to get helped, and the person giving help forgets that they’re trying help, and both people end up trying to “win.” Eventually there comes, on one side or the other, what we have come to refer to as the “gotcha” moment, at which point one of the people involved doesn’t win.

The reason I bring this up is not to try and tell you that we have exceptionally bad support, because I am convinced this sort of thing happens everywhere. Also, I’m not trying to tell you that we have exceptionally great support (but we do!) where this problem has been altogether eliminated; I don’t think there’s any way to ever entirely avoid these situations. But, we are seriously looking at ways to reduce its occurrence, and to help people feel more comfortable and confident communicating with our support staff, in order to minimize the chances of ending up in a situation where you don’t get helped.

Which is more than I can say for all of those other companies. We win!