Team Support is bringing your engineers to your customers

One of the greatest parts of writing this blog is the opportunity to meet with passionate people who are focused on helping customers more easily participate in the success of the products they use every day.  I recently chatted with Robert Johnson and Eric Harrington, CEO and COO of TeamSupport, respectively.  Robert has a great saying, which is also highlighted on their website:

“Great Customer Support = Happy Customers = More Customers!”

Robert not only says it but I sense that he truly means it.  You can’t fake customer centricity.

So what is TeamSupport?

The TeamSupport solution focuses on closing the loop between the customer, the support team, and the product development organization.  It does this by capturing customer issues and requests for product changes that are coming in from e-mail, web forms, standard phone support.    While support data collection is not a differentiator for this product, the workflows that are enabled, and the transparency that is achieved, is where the power of the solution resides.

Understand that the solution is fairly new and still immature in many areas.  The product is a little more than 18 months old and it shows in the user interface.  However, it has promise as a SAAS-based support solution.

Understand that TeamSupport is not a Social Support Community (SSC) and is not trying to be a “social” solution, it just wants to be a great support solution.

Who is using it today?
TeamSupport currently has over 250 customers today. The price point is very good, just $25 per month per seat.  This is cheap, trust me.  I have been speaking with a lot of companies lately and most are significantly higher.

How does it work?

Support engineers process issues as they are coming in, following the standard processes already established by the company.  If the support team cannot resolve an issue for the customer they immediately enter it into the built-in bug system so that the product team can immediately be aware of the issues.

Here are a few of the things I really like about TeamSupport:

•  The system acts as a bug system, ties into source control systems like Subversion, and can feed data back out to your Salesforce or HighRise CRM system.
• The system has solid support for controlling the visibility of individual issues.  This enables development/support to open up the status of issues directly to customers, as they are processed through the system.  You don’t always want this level of visibility, of course, but it’s available when you do want it.
• Search works across the entire system:  Tickets, Knowledgebase, Wiki.  For added value I would love to see them take search to the next level, searching into your uploaded documents, source control, CRM systems. 
• Can report on time spent on a customers, on a certain ticket, a product.  Do have a restful API if you want to pull this data out and push into a real-time and billing system.
• You can easily define various SLAs for different customers, products, etc..  When SLAs are not achieved, alerting makes this obvious to the team so the issue can be resolved.

Where do I feel TeamSupport needs improvements?

The is plenty of room for usability improvements and user interface polishing.  These issues do not block your customers from being successful but could slow down, slightly, your support and product teams. 

Keep an eye on team support if you are looking for a basic support system, it’s worth checking out.

John