The Ultimate Guide: Evolving From a Shared Email Inbox to a Social Help

Desk Is it time for you to switch from your current shared email inbox to a social help desk? We want to make the search simple for you. This guide breaks the research down and

makes it easy to find the right customer solution that’s right for your business.

Kevin Baldacci is a Content Marketer at Desk.com Follow him on Twitter at @kevinbaldacci

To get the most from this guide, take notes. Think about how you can use the ideas, concepts and strategies shared in these pages. We know you’ll find a lot to think about as you read.

• The full economic value of customer service

• Three examples of the chaos theory

• The simple, yet powerful functionalities and features of a social help desk

• How to migrate an email inbox to a social help desk

Table of Contents:

1. The problems with a shared customer support email inbox

2. Chaos theory: three examples of how disorder breeds dissatisfaction

3. The right tools: what you need from a cloud-based helpdesk solution

4. Conclusion and your next steps

5. Appendix: Is it time to switch from an email inbox to a helpdesk application?

After reading it, your business should understand:

The problems with Gmail

The problems with a shared customer support email inbox

Email is an essential communications tool in today’s business world and has become one of the leading forms of communication for customer support. In fact, email is just second to the phone when it comes to consumer preferences about how to contact customer service. 1

So, it’s only natural for young companies to set up an email inbox, such as Gmail, to manage customer service requests. In the beginning, sharing this email inbox among your customer support team can be effective. But as you grow, acquiring more customers and more employees, you can have serious problems on your hands.

The truth is, it’s impossible to develop an effective process for handling customer support situations and tracking all conversations using an email inbox. The result is that support tickets fall through the cracks and questions go unanswered. And this can lead to poor customer satisfaction — and ultimately may impact your bottom line.

This guide from Desk.com will help you determine if it is time for your company to evolve from using a shared email inbox, such as Gmail, for customer service to a more effective solution. We’ll also discuss why this switch is so essential to the continued growth of your business. Lastly, we’ll show how a solution like Desk.com can help you solve issues common to companies currently using a shared email inbox for customer service.

87%

As it currently stands,

of all company

communications are

via email.

1 Genesys. The Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience. 2009

Forrester Research. The State of

Workforce Technology Adoption:

US Benchmark 2009-2015.

Save me from my email inbox!

Desk.com recently surveyed growing companies to learn about their most challenging customer support issues. Not surprisingly, the challenges of using email to manage customer support consistently topped the list, for many reasons:

“One of us would start [addressing requests] at the top of the email list, and the other would start at the bottom and

meet somewhere in the middle.”

“We didn’t have any idea how to track the things

that were affecting customers most.”

“We lack the ability to manage, track and properly document inbound/outbound customer

email.”

“We noticed an uptick in unhappy customers

whose issues had fallen through the cracks. “

“I found myself staring every morning at a field

of sticky notes around the edge of my monitor.”

“Email threads and project management-

related communication are a problem.”

Do any of these responses sound familiar to you? These complaints demonstrate the kind of frustration that growing companies experience using a shared email inbox to manage support. But if you think the employees of these companies are frustrated, think about their customers. Dropped emails, unknowledgeable service agents, or repetitive responses due to a lack of internal coordination can lead to an unsatisfactory customer experience and that can be detrimental to your business.

Costs of poor customer service

of customers that received poor customer service from a company got even by spreading the word about their bad experience.

of consumers are influenced by other consumers’ comments.

61%

According to a study by research

firm Genesys,

of customers who end relationships

took their business to a competitor.

In today’s competitive marketplace, customer service can be a company’s secret sauce. What exactly does that look like? Customers want a more personalized experience, faster response times, and the ability to get support on virtually any channel they choose. These expectations are putting a great deal of pressure on small and growing businesses. While many companies are keenly aware of the value of excellent customer service, they sometimes forget to measure how poor service impacts them. It’s a significant problem. According to a study by research firm Genesys, U.S. companies lose an estimated $83 billion each year due to defections and abandoned purchases as a direct result of a poor experience.2 Even worse, businesses not only lose the customer’s money but essentially push that customer into the arms of competitor: 61% of customers who end relationships took their business to a competitor. 3

Cost of losing current customers

Poor customer service can cause companies to lose even the most forgiving customers. Loyal customers do business with a company because they have developed a relationship and have established a certain level of trust. In many cases, it may have taken thousands of marketing and sales dollars to build this trust. Maintaining the customer and brand relationship typically falls on the plate of customer service. And just one bad experience can harm a relationship and cost a company.

Why is maintaining existing customer relationships so important? In a nutshell, it is cheaper to provide quality customer service and maintain a solid relationship with an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one.

2 Genesys. The Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience. 2009

3 Genesys. The Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience. 2009

SOURCE: ClickFox

SOURCE: ClickFox

The Bonobos Ninjas Gain a Competitive Edge with Customer Service

Desk.com: Give us a quick background behind your customer service team and methodologies?

Bonobos Ninjas: The goal of ninja customer service is for everyone we engage with to be so impressed that they share their story. We essentially give the ninjas the power and freedom to solve customer issues any way they see fit - there are no rules, regulations or hoops to jump through. Ninjas are allowed to just get it done. That means easy transactional interactions are lightning fast with winks of personality, and in-depth interactions reach a smart, generous solution eloquently. Our goal is to hire individuals that are excellent writers, can make decisions quickly and on their own to provide the best solution-based customer service out there – while keeping the interaction personable, fun and unique.

Desk.com: Were there any specific problems that you faced prior to using a Social Help Desk such as Desk.com?

Bonobos Ninjas: Our customer service solution was very low tech initially - it was basically a shared Google inbox. The team would print out the inbox in the morning, and then manually cross out cases as

ninjas worked through them. It was very manual, very low tech. It worked initially, but quickly led to a ton of dropped balls as the company scaled. We then upgraded to an actual customer support program that was essentially a slightly more evolved shared inbox that allowed for some limited metrics reporting. However, it was super hard to manage. We needed developers to install it, and if anything went wrong or we wanted to change something we needed developer support. It felt like it was built in the 90’s - not easy to use.

Desk.com: Do you believe Bonobos’ reputation for providing excellent customer service has given the company a competitive edge?

Bonobos Ninjas: Absolutely. Those who know about our service already come to us with a certain level of trust that they don’t have with other companies. We heard a lot of stories of friends/coworkers/family telling a first-timer about our great product and that our excellent service makes shopping online a breeze. When they aren’t aware of our service reputation, they are surprised and often let us know about their positive experience (proven by our high Net Promoter Score). Customers have told us how being able to trust that we’ll take care of them has turned them into a loyal customer.

Bonobos, an online men’s clothing company, has gained a competitive edge due to their exceptional customer service provided by their support team: the Ninjas. Desk.com recently sat down with a

couple of ninjas and asked them about the sucess they have seen due to a social help desk.

Desk.com: How do you think the Bonobos Ninjas’ overall performance has benefited from having the tools and resources provided by a Social Help Desk, such as Desk.com? Do you think they could perform at a similar level without it?

Bonobos Ninjas: Given Bonobos’ customer centricity, we train all employees in customer service during their first 2 weeks on the job. After creating a login for each employee, it becomes really simple for anyone to plug into our customer ticket queue and start answering cases as they come in. Using a social help desk has allowed us to prioritize cases based on how we see fit. Not only does this help us task-force prioritized cases accordingly but also keep track of how we’re doing based off Desk.com’s reporting function. It’s easy to set up filters and organize cases by priority and also makes it relatively simple for a ninja to take personal responsibility on a specific case with the assign tool. The time rule function is also an excellent way for us to keep track of cases that are slipping behind our SLA. I don’t believe we’d be able to perform at the efficiency/capacity we currently are without a system comparable to Desk.com.

The Chaos Theory

In mathematics, the chaos theory is the principle of how complex systems can produce widely dynamic outcomes difficult to predict.

As your customer base grows and the company becomes more complex you can pretty much predict one thing: the ensuing chaos of your customer service will result in major problems.

The single biggest problem of using an email inbox is the difficulty of managing an ongoing conversation with a customer. As businesses grow, this problem becomes ever more obvious. Before you know it, one of your customer support agents accidentally deletes an email; a customer receives multiple, conflicting responses; agents or customers are added or removed from email chains.

The chaos of an email inbox can cause a number of complications, resulting in an overall loss of business and customer satisfaction. These may include:

Manual updating of the customer’s record of tickets or issues in your CRM, if you use one. Loss of customer service rep productivity and efficiency.

Forgotten, lost or accidentally deleted emails within a single, crowded inbox.

Multiple responses sent to the same customer from different agents who share the same inbox.

An email inbox, and the processes around using it for customer support, are simply not trustworthy. These limitations become more problematic as your business grows. The following examples look at three kinds of “chaos” caused by support using shared email accounts, and why this dysfunction can mean lost revenue for your business.

Chaos type #1: Overlapping emails

Imagine your company is using an email inbox for customer support: you have three agents handling one shared inbox. Currently you’re swamped with emails and calls due to a confusing new product that just rolled out. One customer, named Jaime (marked in dark purple) sends an email to support@company.com due to a technical problem he is having with the new product.

After waiting for 25 minutes for a response, Jaime is anxious to resolve the issue and decides to call your company’s support line. As many customer support agents may know, this is a very common occurrence as Forrester found that 75% of consumers move to another channel when online customer service

Refresh the

page then go

to settings

Have you tried

restarting the

program?

Has anyone

responded

to this

customer?

fails.5 Agent #1 (gray) answers the call and engages in a long discussion on how to repair the error. In the meantime, Agent #2 (green) is answering the original email. Agent #3 (light purple) sees the email from Jaime and has no idea that two other agents are currently answering the question. Now you have three agents working on one problem.

The underlying factor of this equation is the lack of communication and transparency agents have with each other. In order for a system like this to run smoothly, agents need to constantly update each other about the opening and closing of cases. This kind of communication can be time-consuming and decrease productivity. Not only that, the lack of organization and cohesive dialogue is more vulnerable to mistakes.

5 Forrester Researcha. 2011 Will Challenge The Status Quo Of eBusiness Online Customer Service. 2011

Chaos type #2: Division of labor

One of the biggest problems of using a shared inbox is that there is no way to easily assign a case to an agent based on priority. When an email first arrives, who’s responsible for handling it?

Email inboxes, such as Gmail allow agents to create a priority inbox. Some companies assign one rep to monitor the priority inbox in order to make sure important requests don’t slip through the cracks. But this is a temporary fix, and doesn’t solve the problem of triaging and assigning each request as it arrives.

Without a system that assigns an owner to support emails based on priority, agent availability and expertise, you can run into the risk of overlapping emails, or even worse, dropped customer queries. You also can frustrate customers by not assigning their requests to the most knowledgeable agents, or to agents who know their accounts personally.

How do you know who is working on the priority emails?

Manually assigning emails to departments becomes

tedious and emails can fall through the cracks.

Chaos type #3: Delayed responses

It seems like common sense that email is the slowest option for getting customer support. Yet customers’ expectations for a fast response are getting higher all the time. A study by Forrester Research found that 41% of customers expect an email response within six hours — but that only 36% of retail companies responded within that window, and 14% don’t respond at all.6 In today’s social and digital age, companies are closer to their customers than ever before. This is great for brands, but it also raises the bar for customer service. Customers expect companies to fix their problems in extremely short periods of time.

Delayed response times can happen for a number of reasons:

• As discussed previously, teams may not be able to easily assign cases or communicate ownership, which means it’s not always clear who is stepping in to accept and resolve a case.

• Lack of access to customer history and records, as well as a knowledge base of answers to common questions, means agents have to start from square one with each email request, so they take longer to arrive at answers.

• Email doesn’t permit accountability and measurement. There’s no easy way to track how quickly and satisfactorily agents were able to resolve cases, so it’s difficult to coach for improvement.

Manual, constant monitoring all of a company’s different channels, and responding within the expected period of time with knowledgeable, accurate answers, has become nearly impossible for companies of any size. Small companies with a limited customer base might be able to keep up for a while, but as teams grow and customer demands scale, chaos will inevitably ensue.

of customers expect an email response within six hours.

of retail companies responded within that window.

of companies that don’t respond at all.

6 Jupiter Research/Forrester Research, 2009.

A Social Help Desk solves Photojojo’s Overcrowded Inbox

Desk.com: Why did you initially begin using Gmail as a customer support tool? Were there any benefits you initially saw?

Laurel: Initially, we used Gmail because that’s what we were using for our photojojo.com email accounts. We had one inbox for customer support questions, and it worked great because we got so few emails that one person could pretty much handle all of the emails we were receiving. Desk.com: What were some of the specific problems that you faced using an email inbox as a customer support tool?

Laurel: We found work arounds for many of the drawbacks to using Gmail, and held onto it for a long time. During our first unexpectedly busy holiday season we had up to 10 people logging into our shop inbox! Our volume of emails grew to the point were we needed a way for more than one person to be working on answering emails at the same time without stepping on each other’s metaphorical toes.

One other issue that drove us into our helpdesk search was our need to better keep track of our customers. We had so

Laurel: Desk solved both our overcrowded inbox and customer tracking problems. We love using filters to simplify which emails we see when they sit down to support our customers. We don’t have to weed through other people’s conversations anymore. Setting up rules that sort our cases by the email addresses that they’re coming from we can get a clear picture of our history with them right away.

Another benefit is the simple tracking of email volume and response times. We can easily track how many emails are coming and which of our customer supporters are answering emails the most quickly. (Then we ask those CSers to share their efficiency tips with the rest of the team).

One giant benefit for me (I was running the customer support team at the time that we switched over to Desk.com) is that Desk has excellent customer support for its customers. Any time I had a question with the initial set up or just tweaking things over time to make our agent portals as useful as possible, I knew I could always find a solution in Desk’s help center, or from our pal Jake at Desk, who is always just an email away.

many, it was becoming harder to track who had been talking with which customers.

“Desk solved both our overcrowded

inbox and customer tracking problems.”

Desk.com: How did you decide to adopt a customer support solution to alleviate these problems you were facing?

Laurel: When we first went looking for a solution to our single-inbox-woes we turned to our pals who deal with customer support and got a feel for what other people were using. We gathered up a few top recommendations, made a list of features we were hoping to find, compared our top contenders and reached out to them to learn more about what they had to offer. Ultimately we landed on Desk.com (called Assistly at the time).

Desk.com: What were the key benefits of turning to a solution such as Desk.com?

Laurel Sittig is in charge of making sure Photojojo customers are the happiest customers. However prior to a social help desk, Laurel and Photojojo were handling customer support

with Gmail and finding it too difficult to scale with their growing customer base.

The right tools: what you need

Icons indicate where a customer inquiry came from.

No more asking back and forth whether a case

has been resolved.

Assign emails to the appropriate rep or

department.

No more headaches, just peace and organization

The key way to tame chaos is with task management. Unfortunately, as we have already discussed, an email inbox’s capabilities are simply too limited to provide a good task management system. By switching your customer support to a cloud-based system, you can seal the cracks that cause chaos among your agents and customers.

A social help desk solution like Desk.com collects incoming and outgoing customer conversations and turns them into cases or “tickets” — neatly organized into a universal inbox. Now, you and your team have the ability to see who the customer is, whether or not the case has been resolved, which channel the inquiry came from, and who it is assigned to. Rather than sorting through multiple inboxes, customer support can be more productive, with fewer questions about who the case owner and status of the case.

“Desk.com took customer interaction to a new level.”

The right tools: what you need

Each case is assigned a

number.

Add custom information like the customer’s

name and social channels.

Add custom information like

the company name. Include multiple customers within

a company tab.

Build confidence with customer intelligence Customers never like to explain themselves twice, and agents don’t like to be in the dark about a customer's history. With a shared email inbox used for customer support, agents have very few resources to keep track of customers or previous interactions. Gmail enables third-party apps such as Rapportive to access contact information right inside your inbox, but this information is limited and completely divorced from the customer’s support issues. Without integration between this data and past interactions, agents are flying blind and could potentially waste time relearning the customer and their previous issues.

Fortunately, social help desks provide customer histories as well as past interactions, which agents can see as they respond to a customer’s inquiry. This gives agents full confidence — they know who the customer is and whether the person is a new, repeat or VIP customer. Agents will have a leg up on providing superior customer service by getting straight to the heart of the matter rather than wasting time (and the customer’s patience) trying to get to know them.

“Across the board, Desk has improved

the way we communicate with

our customers.”

The right tools: what you need

Automate manual tasks with business rules With a social help desk, customer support agents can blend automation with human interaction so they’re instantly connected with customers. When a customer sends an email, the customer will immediately receive notification that the request has been received, assuring them they will receive a response quickly.

This automated response creates accountability and allows the customer to know there is somebody on the other end. Desk.com includes time-based triggers that automatically escalate unanswered support requests, making sure no customers are forgotten. When a customer support agent replies to the inquiry and the case is considered “solved,” a customer receives an email stating that the ticket is closed, and has the option to reopen the ticket later if necessary.

Create business rules to speed up and gain great control of your support.

Set a case’s status, change who it’s assigned to, alter

its priority and much more.

“Now we get a lot more done with less effort.”

The right tools: what you need

Reach the Holy Grail of customer support... Inbox Zero

Opening an inbox filled with dozens of unread messages can feel overwhelming. Filters can help. Unlike the filters available with an email inbox, a social help desk comes with defined filters that review the progress of incoming and outgoing interactions.

Customer service teams can create as many filters as they need and make them available to individual agents or groups of agents. Teams can use filters to organize their service and create work "queues" for different teams, status, priorities or specialties. Sample filters might include: Pending Cases, Complete Cases, Today’s Work, VIP Customers.

Filters automatically update when emails come in, are updated, or are in use by another agent. You know exactly what you need to work on and can avoid multiple people replying to the same email.

With a cloud-based customer support application, you have full access to your customer support requests anywhere, anytime — even on mobile devices. You’re always connected to your customer, even on the go.

Use filters to organize your service and create work

"queues" for different teams or specialities. Default

filters include: "All Cases," "Pending Cases," "Completed

Cases," and "Today's Work."

“Desk.com is so good that

I’m thinking of forwarding every

single email in my inbox to it.”

The right tools: what you need

Stop answering repetitive questions with macros

One of the most tiring and frustrating experiences agents face is answering the same question over and over again for customers. With Gmail, agents don’t really have much choice but to continue answering the same questions. The most efficient way to do so is to create a document of answers and to copy and paste them into an email whenever a repetitive question arises.

With a social help desk, agents can use a feature called “macros,” or quick shortcuts to quickly process emails in your queue. Agents can use macros to contain full scripts written in advance (and that are approved and consistently updated) with commonly used phrases, or even just a custom signature for quicker replies.

Add as many macros as you want. Speed through

cases with smart shortcuts.

“Desk.com gives us the flexibility

to handle support our way.”

Rely on macros to issue a standard response that

you use over and over—or to perform several actions

at once. Macros make agents more productive.

Matt Wigham, CEO of Big Cartel, has something of a development background. In fact, Big Cartel’s community-facing help area was designed and built by him and his team. He had been looking for a better way to handle customer service and support issues, and had tried a number of support systems, but they weren’t quite right. He found them slow and cumbersome even compared to Gmail. Then a few months ago he discovered Desk.com, and a recommendation from friend at Squarespace convinced him that was the best route for them.

“Getting us from Gmail to a

dedicated CRM system had been a back burner, pet project of mine for quite a while. I wanted to be certain before we fully committed to a platform. Once we had more than one person in support, the risk of confusion was just too great. We were using Gmail exclusively, and with more than one person using the same email account, we had been mired in a clunky ‘colored stars’ approach that just wasn’t efficient.”

He also wanted more design control and was also immediately drawn to Desk.com’s easy set up and absence of forwarding.

“It just felt like a smarter way of doing it. We never could get other support systems set up exactly as we wanted, and none of them felt like the perfect fit. Desk.com was simple and intuitive. Like our Gmail experience, it worked like an email client but in a way tailored for support requests. It didn’t take any time

“It just felt like a smarter way of doing it. We never could get other support systems set up exactly as we wanted, and none of them felt like the

perfect fit.”- Matt Wingham, Big Cartel

at all to learn. I signed up for the trial, kicked the tires, migrated our sister site, Pulley, over to make sure it was working well, and made the switchover. ”

“I’ve been pleased with the ability to tie right in. We could use Desk.com for exactly the things we needed, and then leverage the other areas we’ve already established ourselves. Since we deployed, I’ve been discovering more gems about the software. You can tell there are some like-minded people developing their system.”

Wigham says that the real strength of Desk.com to Big Cartel is that they were “able to use it exactly as we wanted it to perform.”

“It handles tickets smoothly, it’s great for multiuser collaboration, and it had great integration that we didn’t get elsewhere. I’d say overall that Desk.com’s flexibility and customizability are the biggest benefits. We’re very happy with Desk.com, and we feel confident about adding new customer agents as we grow. We’re excited about what Desk.com has in mind for the future.”

Big Cartel takes customer service from Gmail to a social help desk

Moving to a social help desk

“So how do I get started moving to a social help desk?” Moving from an email inbox such as Gmail to a social help desk is an easy process, and the best part is, your customers will hardly know the difference! They will notice a higher quality of support, faster responses and an overall better customer service experience — but there will be no disruption in their communication with you.

If you already have a support Gmail account of email address you use for customers, there’s no need to change the email address when using Desk.com. Our system uses your company’s IMAP server to receive emails, but don’t worry - it’s easy to set up. Simply start forwarding all incoming mail to your default Desk.com support email address. Your Gmail account or email inbox will feed directly into Desk.com, to tame those overflowing support inboxes. Once you’ve configured a mailbox and sent in a test email, you’ll see your first case appear within the agent’s interface.

Migrating from Gmail or an email inbox is simple and the results are amazing. If your organization is having troubles with problems such as the chaos theory or poor customer service, there is no excuse not to move to a social help desk such as Desk.com. Imagine an email inbox that is easy to use with more functionality that involves hardly any training.

“Set up was so easy! We were answering incoming

emails within an hour.”

Conclusion

Customer service is a vital part of a company’s business. Those that fail to take the necessary steps to provide their employees with the right tools to provide nothing short of the best customer service may face dire consequences. In fact, great service can lead to greater profits for a company. Unfortunately, a shared email inbox such as Gmail simply does not have the capacity to handle customer support for growing businesses. As customer bases grow and more employees handle inquiries or cases, an email inbox becomes too cluttered and confusing to provide exceptional service. Fortunately, a social help desk such as Desk.com relieves the stress of case management, lack of efficiency and even goes so much as to improve customer service.

Now it’s time for you to begin experiencing the simplicity and power of a social help desk. Desk.com offers a free 14-day trial where you can have access to all of the great features explained in this book. Here are some of the benefits you will have with Desk.com:

• YourGmailaccountscanfeeddirectlyintoDesk.com,totameoverflowingsupportinboxes

• NomorecustomerissueswillfallthroughthecrackswithDesk.com’sairtightcasemanagementsystem

• Desk.comembraces“wholecompanysupport”

Our flexible pricing means that everyone in your progressive organization can connect with today’s influential customers and build relationships.

Desk.com has an unlimited amount of great resources ranging from more information about our product to thought leadership content. Here are some suggestions:

• TheDesk.comLibrary

• Desk.com’sBlog

• TheSocialHelpDeskCheatSheet

Appendix

Is it time to switch from an email inbox to a social help desk application?

Based on research with our customers, Desk.com has compiled a checklist of decision points that can help you determine whether it’s the right time to move to a social help desk. Place a check next to any of the following criteria that are true for your company. If you check five or more

boxes, you should consider a social help desk solution for your customer support.

Customer emails regularly exceed 24 hours before they are resolved.

You have more than 5 members on your support team.

You frequently have to refer your customers to multiple departments and/or agents in order for them to get the right response.

Agents sometimes miss customer messages both traditional and social channels because they are unable to monitor and track each email effectively.

Agents have trouble tracking the customer emails and customer details.

Tracking agent performance and email volume is difficult.

Customers are increasingly expressing frustration when contacting your support team.

Customers are frequently contacting your support team to resolve their issue.

Customers have no method to solve their own problems outside of contacting the support agents directly.

Agents sometimes or frequently work on the same customer issue because they are unaware that another agent is already handling the case.