Helping Companies Build Stronger Customer Relationships | #customersupport #supporticket

In November of this year, CIO Review will feature TeamSupport as a Top 20 CRM Solution. They sat down with TeamSupport co-founder and COO Eric Harrington to talk about customer support in the time of COVID and building strong customer relationships.

CIO Review: In your interactions with customers, what sense do you get of the challenges they face now in the CRM space and how is TeamSupport​ effectively addressing these issues?

Eric: It is an absolute no-brainer that COVID has impacted us all. Most businesses have adopted remote work, and in some cases, have sent thousands of employees home. While remote work is nothing new, many of them have had to jump out in the cold. Thankfully we live in a time where technology is advanced enough to be easily accessible and leveraged quickly. Managing customer relationships, on the other hand, has been incredibly challenging. For many in B2B, those in-person meetings have been a vital method for building and maintaining rapport, and now they have to use video calls to accomplish the same. To this end, helping enterprises rekindle the spirit of customer relations is the goal of TeamSupport. Built for remote working, our solution has enabled the concept of support teams in different time zones around the world, as well as global customers with unique needs, holidays, and SLAs. We have always been focused on helping businesses support their customers through collaboration, and understanding customer relationships no matter where they are.

CIO Review: What about the challenges of security and compliance?

Eric: As many of us faced in the early pioneering days of SaaS, helping companies understand how their data was stored, secured, and managed was a bit of a challenge. In the mid 2000s, most businesses were still accustomed to their CRM data being inside their walls, on their servers, and managed by their IT department. While the trust score overall has increased, that score is challenged every year with news of a large entity being hacked. This has resulted in more intrigue, and laws and certifications that require extensive investment and time. We expect this trend to continue for many years.

Resiliency, similar to security, also impacts the trust score, and will continue to play a key role in the reputation of businesses with their customers. Once customers have become comfortable about the security of their data, the next concern is availability. Businesses will continue to invest heavily to ensure customer data is available, safe ,and backed up through disaster recovery operations. Cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS make this incredibly easier to manage, but come with significant costs in many cases.

CIO Review: “TeamSupport is the leading B2B-focused customer support solution that actually helps you build satisfaction and loyalty.” Walk us through this statement and shed some light on the methodology, features, and benefits involved?

Eric: TeamSupport was built to knock down company silos that were hoarding important customer information. Traditionally, while support teams knew of the customer through ticket interactions, the sales team knew of the customer through their sales engagements, and product teams typically knew nothing about the customers—and focused only on what needed to be built, without considering how customers were using their technology. Our solution brought these teams together by being one of the first support solutions to include not only ticketing, but a robust customer database, a product database, and near real-time reporting. This ignites true collaboration around the customer and empowers businesses to provide world-class customer support, which in turn increases their competitive advantage.

With TeamSupport, support and product/engineering teams have a direct line of communication and see the same customer information, so there’s no longer a case of misunderstanding and wasted time trying to communicate the customer truth. As a positive consequence, employee moral improves because there is more clarity and less ambiguity and chaos.

TeamSupport‘s powerful features, like its proprietary Customer Distress Index™ (CDI), inform actionable strategies for customers who may be in danger of churn. Further, it integrates with important solutions used by companies, such as Salesforce, Jira, Microsoft (Dynamics and Teams), Hubspot, and Slack, to name a few.

CIO Review continues its Q&A with TeamSupport’s Eric Harrington in Part 2 where they discuss what sets TeamSupport apart and current trends in B2B customer support.

About Eric Harrington Co-founding TeamSupport in 2008, Eric helped build what is now a global mission-critical business solution for managing customer support. TeamSupport increases enterprise value by strengthening customer relationships that result in reduced churn, consistent renewals, account expansion, and advocacy. Learn more about Eric.