We all need helpdesk
To think of developing a cloud helpdesk system in 2018 from the outside seemed not the most sober idea - at first glance there is a market, there are domestic and foreign solutions, there are also enough self-written systems. To conceive the development of a new system when you already have a large CRM-development and more than 6,000 âliveâ and active clients who constantly need something, is generally resource madness. But it was precisely these six thousand that became the reason why we undertook and wrote our helpdesk. In parallel, we conducted market research, talked with our future competitors, tormented the focus group, tested demos in the humble hope of understanding that everything was invented before us. But no - we did not find reasons to stop development. And the first exit to Habr in the beginning of August showed that everything was not in vain. Therefore, today it is somewhat subjective - about our observations of the world of helpdesk systems.
When tech support didn't work very well
Our ZEDLine Support appeared for a reason. So, we are developers of solutions for automation of small and medium-sized businesses, among which there is a flagship - RegionSoft CRM. We wrote something about 90 articles on HabrĂ©, so the old-timers of the profile hubs have already managed to split into haters and a support group. But if you have not yet joined and generally hear for the first time, then we will explain: this is a universal desktop CRM system that is installed on the clientâs server, is actively developed for client business requirements, supported, updated, etc. And we also have several thousand clients who ask questions, send bug reports, ask for help and just want something. That is, applications and applications - a wagon and a small trolley. As a result, at some point, our support got overloaded, hot headsets, phones and nerves, confusion with the order of tasks, priorities, and so on. For a long time, we solved these problems with our desktop CRM, then we tried various bugtrackers and task management systems, but it was not all that. We realized that for effective work, we must first of all provide our clients with the opportunity to independently create applications (applications) and around the clock to monitor their processing by our operators online. It follows that the solution should not be desktop, but cloudy, accessible from any device and at any time. We formulated several main conditions:
And what do you think - we did not find such a solution. That is, we looked at more than 20 solutions, chose 12 for the test, tested 9 (why we couldnât, say, why offend our competitors, but on one of them, for example, the portal didnât start - promised in 5 minutes, then it hung )
All this time, we evaluated the market and recorded observations: from the position of a development engineer, support and marketer. What did we learn and what somewhat distorted us?
In general, we were depressed. And we decided that we needed to develop our own help desk - which is suitable for us, and our clients from all areas of the business, and service centers, and IT companies (including organizing an internal customer support service - it works very cool as an aid to system administrators). No sooner said than done: on August 3, 2019, we launched ZEDLine Support in production, a simple, convenient cloud help desk with client access. By that time, we were actively using it ourselves - this is how it looks with us now:
The main window with a list of applications and customer requests
And here the moment comes to tell about Habré on Habré. We have been blogging for over three years, experienced and shot - so why not come out with a new product? It was a little scary, but still we took the first three steps:
Our fears have been exaggerated. In the first month, we received more than 50 registered portals (to be honest, we didnât even plan such a result), many contacts with potential customers and even the first warm and pleasant reviews, in which we especially noted ... the simplicity and speed of our ZEDLine Support . That is exactly what we initially started developing this service for. Now we are actively working with calls, no less actively filling in the backlog and adding features.
The main essence of any ticket system is the application form. It should be convenient for the client, simple, not have unnecessary and confusing options and at the same time give comprehensive information on the problem so that the operator can immediately take the task to work and understand what exactly is wrong, in which direction the problem should be fixed or request additional information.
As a result, we get applications of this type:
And most importantly, we have implemented such a coveted portal scheme. A portal is a personal environment of interaction between a portal owner and its customers. If you created a portal for yourself, then it will have a unique URL, its own database, disk space, etc. Your customers will be able to enter this portal at the provided URL and create requests or requests that immediately go to a single journal, from where the operators (your employees) take them to work.
How does a client know the URL of your portal? Having our helpdesk, you place a link to it wherever the user may want to ask you a question: on the site, in social networks, in email or instant messengers and chats, and even in a widget or article on Habré. The user clicks on your link, registers in a form of three fields and enters the application. Login and password are duplicated by mail.
In addition, operators themselves can generate invitations for customers from their personal account to save customers even from the elementary filling of a small form. The invitation will be sent to the client by e-mail, and in the text of the invitation there will already be all the necessary information to enter the portal: URL, login, password.
Immediately after registering or receiving an invitation, the client enters the portal, creates an application, filling out the fields of the questionnaire, and gets access to his copy of ZEDLine Support - that is, he sees the status of his calls, can create and see messages in the internal chat with the operator, can attach and view investments, in general, to monitor the progress of solving their problems. For all events, the user receives email alerts, so there is no need to sit in the interface and press F5 to update the ticket parameters.
This approach to the interface allows you to go through a simple registration and immediately get down to business, rather than understanding the wilds of functionality. This is logical, because the client can use the helpdesk only several times (and sometimes even once) during the entire life cycle of interaction with you, and it does not need to be overloaded.
The appetite comes with eating, and while we were developing the operatorâs interface and the customer portal, the idea came that the personal account should also be logical, convenient and comprehensive. So they did: in your account you can configure your profile (if you are an operator), configure ZEDLine Support yourself, track payments, view users, set up a profile and see statistics (if you are an administrator). Again, the âreasonably simpleâ principle has been implemented: the operator works in the most simple interface and this gives a number of advantages:
By the way, about training - the first time you log into the system, the user is greeted by an interactive tutorial that âguidesâ the beginner through the entire interface and tells you how ZEDLine Support works. It will be shown until you click the "do not show again" button.
All clarifications and questions are asked in the chat, so you can:
So back to the administratorâs office. There, among other things, there is an e-mail setting for alerts, disk space control and so on. And billing is also there - you will always know when, what money and what was spent.
There are two sections in billing: subscription and transactions. In a subscription, you can change the tariff, the number of operators, extend the subscription and replenish the balance in just one movement. In case of replenishment, an invoice for payment is generated for you directly in the ZEDLine Support interface.
In transactions, you can see all transactions related to payments and charges. You can also see who and when made the payment and completed the transaction. By the way, payment of bonuses in the screenshot is not an accident or a test: until September 30, 2019, a promotion is valid - when replenishing the balance, we give 50% of the replenishment amount as a bonus. For example, when paying 5,000 rubles, 7,500 rubles are credited to the balance. And the same entry will appear in the billing interface :-)
And yes, since it came to payment: we have a free tariff + three paid. And we can declare that we are ready to modify the help desk of ZEDLine Support to the requirements of your business - for the standard payment of the working hours of the programmers of our company. We very often do refinements for RegionSoft CRM, we easily and quickly write and agree on the terms of reference and get to work, so our experience allows us to make custom decisions as well.
At the moment, the ZEDLine Support helpdesk is integrated with our RegionSoft CRM CRM system, but now we can provide access to the beta version of the API by special request and, in addition to improvements, there will be many opportunities for integration.
And finally, we managed to achieve another very important goal from our point of view - to make the system very fast. After all, the speed of the systemâs reaction to user actions makes users comfortable. With the further development of the system, which is inevitable, we will pay special attention to speed and fight for it.
In short, this is how our help desk ZEDLine Support turned out - and judging by the feedback from the first users, we did not miss.
At the beginning of the article, we mentioned that most of the help desks are about IT and for IT-employees. This has its own logic, but this is not entirely true. Here is just a sample list of those whose work will facilitate a simple and convenient help desk.
There are a million reasons to write to the company rather than call, among which there are two main ones: the habit of communicating in instant messengers using text and the ability to start solving a problem during business hours without hiding with the phone in the corners and not disturbing colleagues. One link to your helpdesk instance will help solve all the problems of omnichannel, accessibility, responsiveness, etc.
Today, our team has been using the ZEDLine Support helpdesk for the longest time (which is logical), and we, as experienced business automation experts, constantly exchange opinions, look for new features, and sometimes argue. But one opinion agrees: it is convenient for us, it is convenient for our customers who leave appeals. And support operators have become much easier to work with user requests.
When a company outgrows a certain barrier, an understanding comes to the leadership that itâs not enough just to sell a product or service to a client. It is necessary to organize interaction with the client so that he appreciates the quality of the after-sales service, paid or free. It is necessary to fight for each client and counteract the dump of regular customers, accumulating the mass of customers. And this is achieved in turn by working to increase the level of loyalty. Therefore, the client must be sure that his appeal to the company with the problem will not be lost and will not hang somewhere out there, in the bowels of the employees, and will not depend on the human factor. This is exactly the task that ZEDLine Support service can solve.
When tech support didn't work very well
The reasons that made us write our helpdesk
Our ZEDLine Support appeared for a reason. So, we are developers of solutions for automation of small and medium-sized businesses, among which there is a flagship - RegionSoft CRM. We wrote something about 90 articles on HabrĂ©, so the old-timers of the profile hubs have already managed to split into haters and a support group. But if you have not yet joined and generally hear for the first time, then we will explain: this is a universal desktop CRM system that is installed on the clientâs server, is actively developed for client business requirements, supported, updated, etc. And we also have several thousand clients who ask questions, send bug reports, ask for help and just want something. That is, applications and applications - a wagon and a small trolley. As a result, at some point, our support got overloaded, hot headsets, phones and nerves, confusion with the order of tasks, priorities, and so on. For a long time, we solved these problems with our desktop CRM, then we tried various bugtrackers and task management systems, but it was not all that. We realized that for effective work, we must first of all provide our clients with the opportunity to independently create applications (applications) and around the clock to monitor their processing by our operators online. It follows that the solution should not be desktop, but cloudy, accessible from any device and at any time. We formulated several main conditions:
- maximum simplicity and transparency: application â clarifications â work progress â result
- Cloud client portal with maximum simplicity and a linear interface: registered â logged in â wrote â checked status â chatted â satisfied
- lack of overpayment for unnecessary functions such as integrations with social networks, complex dashboards, customer base, etc. That is, we did not need a hybrid helpdesk and CRM.
And what do you think - we did not find such a solution. That is, we looked at more than 20 solutions, chose 12 for the test, tested 9 (why we couldnât, say, why offend our competitors, but on one of them, for example, the portal didnât start - promised in 5 minutes, then it hung )
All this time, we evaluated the market and recorded observations: from the position of a development engineer, support and marketer. What did we learn and what somewhat distorted us?
- Some of the help desks do not have client portals - that is, the client cannot see what is happening with his application, who works with it. Almost all services boast omnichannel (collecting applications from at least Odnoklassniki), but most of them do not have easy access to the service when you log in and your applications are in full view.
- Most help desks are tailored specifically for the needs of IT services, that is, they relate to ITSM services. This is certainly not bad, but helpdesk is needed by many companies that have a support service (from an online store to a service center and an advertising agency). Yes, the solutions can be adjusted to any topic, but how many extra functions will remain to hang in the interface!
- There are industry solutions for service centers on the market: equipment accounting and labeling, repair services, geolocation of couriers and service people. Again for non-service companies by.
- Universal solutions that can be adapted to any business requirements are quite expensive. Well, of course, tuning (you will understand later why not finalization) - for some money. Foreign solutions are indecently expensive for the Russian market.
- Some vendors accept payment immediately for a minimum period of 3 or 6 months, you can not rent software using the SaaS model for a month. Yes, they promise to return the "unused" money if during this time you decide to refuse to use their helpdesk, but this situation itself is inconvenient, especially for micro-businesses, which need to carefully control costs.
- To our great surprise, most helpdesk vendors either refused to finalize in principle, saying that there was no such service, or they sent it to the API. But even platform solutions answered that in principle they could help, "but you better try it yourself - a regular programmer will figure it out." Well, we have them, but who doesnât ?!
- More than half of the solutions have an overloaded interface and, as a result, staff training is required, since everyone needs to somehow orient themselves in this. Suppose an engineer understands himself in a few hours or in a day, but what about simple support workers who already have enough load?
- And finally, the thing that revolted us the most was that the vast majority of systems tested were surprisingly slow! Portals are created for a long time, open and start for a long time, applications are saved slowly - and this is with a good connection speed (about 35 Mbps in tests). Even during the demonstrations, the systems were suspended and the elementary opening of the application took 5 seconds or more. ( By the way, here we were most touched by one of the managers of a well-known vendor who, when asked what kind of a spin wheel was loading for so long, replied that this is how Skype transmits, but actually does not hang ). For some, we found a reason - data centers are far from Moscow; for some, we were unable to get to the bottom of the reasons. By the way, several helpdesk developers several times during the conversation emphasized that all data is stored in Russian data centers (to which people brought 152-FZ!).
In general, we were depressed. And we decided that we needed to develop our own help desk - which is suitable for us, and our clients from all areas of the business, and service centers, and IT companies (including organizing an internal customer support service - it works very cool as an aid to system administrators). No sooner said than done: on August 3, 2019, we launched ZEDLine Support in production, a simple, convenient cloud help desk with client access. By that time, we were actively using it ourselves - this is how it looks with us now:
The main window with a list of applications and customer requests
So, we went into production
And here the moment comes to tell about Habré on Habré. We have been blogging for over three years, experienced and shot - so why not come out with a new product? It was a little scary, but still we took the first three steps:
- They wrote a post â Technical support at a time ... two ... three ... â - a little revealed the topic of organizing technical support in the company and introduced ZEDLine Support.
- Wrote a post " Sysadmin vs boss: the struggle between good and evil? "- talked about the difficult relationship between the leader and the system administrator, revealed the topic of forming technical support for the internal client.
- We launched contextual advertising on Google and Yandex - in both cases, only on search, because we have long been firmly disappointed in the Display Network.
Our fears have been exaggerated. In the first month, we received more than 50 registered portals (to be honest, we didnât even plan such a result), many contacts with potential customers and even the first warm and pleasant reviews, in which we especially noted ... the simplicity and speed of our ZEDLine Support . That is exactly what we initially started developing this service for. Now we are actively working with calls, no less actively filling in the backlog and adding features.
Dreams come true: what ZEDLine Support looks like now
The main essence of any ticket system is the application form. It should be convenient for the client, simple, not have unnecessary and confusing options and at the same time give comprehensive information on the problem so that the operator can immediately take the task to work and understand what exactly is wrong, in which direction the problem should be fixed or request additional information.
As a result, we get applications of this type:
And most importantly, we have implemented such a coveted portal scheme. A portal is a personal environment of interaction between a portal owner and its customers. If you created a portal for yourself, then it will have a unique URL, its own database, disk space, etc. Your customers will be able to enter this portal at the provided URL and create requests or requests that immediately go to a single journal, from where the operators (your employees) take them to work.
How does a client know the URL of your portal? Having our helpdesk, you place a link to it wherever the user may want to ask you a question: on the site, in social networks, in email or instant messengers and chats, and even in a widget or article on Habré. The user clicks on your link, registers in a form of three fields and enters the application. Login and password are duplicated by mail.
In addition, operators themselves can generate invitations for customers from their personal account to save customers even from the elementary filling of a small form. The invitation will be sent to the client by e-mail, and in the text of the invitation there will already be all the necessary information to enter the portal: URL, login, password.
Immediately after registering or receiving an invitation, the client enters the portal, creates an application, filling out the fields of the questionnaire, and gets access to his copy of ZEDLine Support - that is, he sees the status of his calls, can create and see messages in the internal chat with the operator, can attach and view investments, in general, to monitor the progress of solving their problems. For all events, the user receives email alerts, so there is no need to sit in the interface and press F5 to update the ticket parameters.
This approach to the interface allows you to go through a simple registration and immediately get down to business, rather than understanding the wilds of functionality. This is logical, because the client can use the helpdesk only several times (and sometimes even once) during the entire life cycle of interaction with you, and it does not need to be overloaded.
The appetite comes with eating, and while we were developing the operatorâs interface and the customer portal, the idea came that the personal account should also be logical, convenient and comprehensive. So they did: in your account you can configure your profile (if you are an operator), configure ZEDLine Support yourself, track payments, view users, set up a profile and see statistics (if you are an administrator). Again, the âreasonably simpleâ principle has been implemented: the operator works in the most simple interface and this gives a number of advantages:
- he is not distracted by other sections
- system settings unified
- obvious administrator responsibility for configuration failures
- most of the information is protected from operators
- operators are very quickly trained to work with such an interface (saving on training + quick start).
By the way, about training - the first time you log into the system, the user is greeted by an interactive tutorial that âguidesâ the beginner through the entire interface and tells you how ZEDLine Support works. It will be shown until you click the "do not show again" button.
All clarifications and questions are asked in the chat, so you can:
- track the progress of the resolution of the issue and monitor the change of statuses
- transfer (delegate) the task to other employees without retelling the previous story
- quickly share necessary files and screenshots
- save all information about the problem and easily contact them if a similar one occurs.
So back to the administratorâs office. There, among other things, there is an e-mail setting for alerts, disk space control and so on. And billing is also there - you will always know when, what money and what was spent.
There are two sections in billing: subscription and transactions. In a subscription, you can change the tariff, the number of operators, extend the subscription and replenish the balance in just one movement. In case of replenishment, an invoice for payment is generated for you directly in the ZEDLine Support interface.
In transactions, you can see all transactions related to payments and charges. You can also see who and when made the payment and completed the transaction. By the way, payment of bonuses in the screenshot is not an accident or a test: until September 30, 2019, a promotion is valid - when replenishing the balance, we give 50% of the replenishment amount as a bonus. For example, when paying 5,000 rubles, 7,500 rubles are credited to the balance. And the same entry will appear in the billing interface :-)
And yes, since it came to payment: we have a free tariff + three paid. And we can declare that we are ready to modify the help desk of ZEDLine Support to the requirements of your business - for the standard payment of the working hours of the programmers of our company. We very often do refinements for RegionSoft CRM, we easily and quickly write and agree on the terms of reference and get to work, so our experience allows us to make custom decisions as well.
At the moment, the ZEDLine Support helpdesk is integrated with our RegionSoft CRM CRM system, but now we can provide access to the beta version of the API by special request and, in addition to improvements, there will be many opportunities for integration.
And finally, we managed to achieve another very important goal from our point of view - to make the system very fast. After all, the speed of the systemâs reaction to user actions makes users comfortable. With the further development of the system, which is inevitable, we will pay special attention to speed and fight for it.
In short, this is how our help desk ZEDLine Support turned out - and judging by the feedback from the first users, we did not miss.
Who needs helpdesk and why?
At the beginning of the article, we mentioned that most of the help desks are about IT and for IT-employees. This has its own logic, but this is not entirely true. Here is just a sample list of those whose work will facilitate a simple and convenient help desk.
- System administrators who can create an internal ticket system to work with colleagues' appeals and not randomly rush about floors and offices, but calmly respond to official applications (they are also proof of busy working hours).
- Service companies and service centers that work with various equipment and various tasks for customer complaints.
- Any company where there is customer support by phone and through chats - in order to allow the client to formulate their question in writing and to monitor the progress of work, and at the same time to store all applications in one place.
There are a million reasons to write to the company rather than call, among which there are two main ones: the habit of communicating in instant messengers using text and the ability to start solving a problem during business hours without hiding with the phone in the corners and not disturbing colleagues. One link to your helpdesk instance will help solve all the problems of omnichannel, accessibility, responsiveness, etc.
Today, our team has been using the ZEDLine Support helpdesk for the longest time (which is logical), and we, as experienced business automation experts, constantly exchange opinions, look for new features, and sometimes argue. But one opinion agrees: it is convenient for us, it is convenient for our customers who leave appeals. And support operators have become much easier to work with user requests.
When a company outgrows a certain barrier, an understanding comes to the leadership that itâs not enough just to sell a product or service to a client. It is necessary to organize interaction with the client so that he appreciates the quality of the after-sales service, paid or free. It is necessary to fight for each client and counteract the dump of regular customers, accumulating the mass of customers. And this is achieved in turn by working to increase the level of loyalty. Therefore, the client must be sure that his appeal to the company with the problem will not be lost and will not hang somewhere out there, in the bowels of the employees, and will not depend on the human factor. This is exactly the task that ZEDLine Support service can solve.
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