Alright, first things first. We will be in New York City next week (May 21-23) for TechCrunch Disrupt and we’d be super delighted to meet you guys there. Drop us a “hi” at the Sponsors area near the Quotidian Ventured Pavilion, and we have some cool give-aways for you to take back to work.

The event will be at Pier 94 (West 55th and 12th) and we are super excited to the meet some of our high energy customers there. If you are are still debating on whether you should be attending Disrupt this year, you should check out the awesome-packed agenda.

Oh, and we have a super special Freshdesk offer for startups that’s worth almost a billion gazzilion dollars (thanks Techcrunch, for covering the story), so drop by our table at Disrupt NY 2012, and say “Fresh-i-licious”. Meet you there!

You might have already noticed the Facebook “messages” capability for business pages.
So far individuals could go all undercover and take their private conversations offline through messages, but the only way to talk to a business on Facebook was on its wall. In public view!

Customer identity gets more secure, thanks to Facebook messages

With Freshdesk, businesses can already support customers through their Facebook wall. Now they can take their support to private messages as well. So what does this mean for your customers and your business?

Brand lovers can finally be discreet in their critique: Facebook has been a great place for customers to voice their opinions with the world. Now as customers talk to brands directly as well, through Facebook messages, businesses can rest assured that complaints get ticketed, assigned and answered through Freshdesk, whether it came through messages or the wall.

Sharing sensitive information “off the air”:  A lot of times, businesses could need some sensitive information from the customer, like account details, email IDs or even their mother’s maiden name (seriously). The kind of stuff you wouldn’t want floating around in public. Now customers get to move the conversation off the air, by messaging the brand. And support teams using Freshdesk get all the details they need, without compromising their customer’s identity.

Finally, the whole loop in one place: If a customer has been frustrated enough to complain on Facebook, telling him/her to shoot a support email is not going to make him/her very happy. Support teams now get to run the whole conversation loop, shifting between “world-view mode” on their walls, and “incognito mode” on their messages.

Lesser timeline spam: Users look forward getting information about a brand that is relevant to them, when they like a page on Facebook. A timeline filled with conversations between the company and individual user has no consequence to anyone else. Now that individual conversations with a customer is moved to the message box, brands can show off a timeline with information pertinent to the whole community.

Converting Facebook messages into Helpdesk tickets

So there. You can check out how you can start supporting your customers through Facebook, using Freshdesk here. Or just go ahead and give your social help desk a spin with the free 30 day Trial.

For those who came in late, this is Part 2 of our Customer Service Spotlight Series.
In Part 1, we covered what customer service means to the consumer, and how going that extra mile for the customer could earn their business for life.

In that light, great customer service is not really a difficult thing to achieve. But it is important to align the business processes with the consumer, so customer service becomes an integral part of the brand. We’ll take that idea forward here.

Service, Brand and all those Intangibles

Customer service deals with the human side of an organization. Feelings, emotions, perceptions, behavior, understanding – all those things that matter, but you can’t quite affix a number to. Intangibles that you just can’t plot on your weekly reports. And  that is exactly the reason why they are so difficult for most businesses to visualize and implement.

But if you can’t measure it, how do you make customer service an organization-wide goal?

The Problem: Putting it on a Graph

That is where it gets tough. It’s easy to wake up one morning and decide to make “customer service” a business priority. But actually getting on the hot seat and showing progress? That’s quite another. How do you bring “emotions” into your product? How do you make your customer feel like part of your business? How do you strategize, measure and grow the customer-focus into an organization wide philosophy?

To start off, you need to be able to Tangiblize the Intangible. And to be fair, this is going to be a challenge. And playing that challenge right is the difference between brands that consumers love and brands that hide in the inconspicuous back shelf in your local super-market.

Getting a hold and ”Tangibilizing” the Intangibles

Almost every time we have a support experience that we love, it has something to do with how we perceive the support rep on the other side of the table. Probably the nice lady at the phone company patiently listened to your billing issues. Or the flight attendent managed to wrestle a seat for you in the next flight. Or the waiter at the restaurant could actually explain the dish to you.

Sensitivity, attitude, tone, knowledge , understanding, tact, guidance. Little emotions that are a big deal. And every one of these customer service love story is made up of two fundamental elements: the Process and the Person.

A lot of personal warmth blocked out by rigid processes is just as bad as a nice flexible organization with a Charles Manson for a support rep.

Almost every business which has nailed the customer service game right, has one thing in common: the perfect blend between the  intangible personal warmth of every service rep, and the structured surety of set processes.

The difference between a Killer Service and a Service Killer

That makes just two dimensions to create that killer customer service. The procedural dimension that consists of established systems and procedures to deliver products and services, and the personal dimension is how service providers use attitudes, behaviors and verbal skills and interact with customers.

If you graphed a support desk on these axes, the quadrant it ends up in tells you the customer focus in that company.

The Customer Service Chart

When personal as well as procedural dimensions are low, the customer service essentially says : “I don’t care. No Soup for You!”. When the personal dimension is bad but the procedural dimension is good, the customer service is saying – “You are number 89312. And we will process you. Some day!”.

A high rank on the personal dimension and poor procedural score says – “We are trying hard, but we don’t know what we are doing. Please stay on the line and a support rep will be with you shortly”.

The last quadrant, the one where we want to be, when both procedural and personal dimensions are good, the service is saying – “We care and we deliver. Would you like me to super-size that, by the way?”.

The company which has support processes in place which blend in the ‘intangible’ personal dimensions is the company that will have the upper hand. Empowering employees to take decisions on service issues themselves is an example of this. We talked about a company which did exactly this on our blog before – Zappos. Zappos’ customer service is legendary, and is the result of a planned, concerted effort to combine the tangible and the intangible.

The Customer Service Quadrant is a good place to start if you want to evaluate your business’s support processes before ramping them up with a dash of personality.

You care for your customers. It’s time to let your customers know how much.

What is Customer Service?

This post is the first part of a blog series from Freshdesk, in which we will try to answer that ever elusive question – ‘How to deliver the best customer service possible.’ Covering all the aspects of customer service that a business should know, understand and care about, this is an attempt at brand journalism, and an insight into how Freshdesk, as a company, looks at Customer Service.

Let’s begin then, shall we?

The Question

So, what is Service?

Well, it’s about beaming a smile to your customers. Or just putting up a bunch of “Customer is Right” posters right next to your billing counter. Right? Well, definitely not wrong… If Schrodinger were in customer support, he would have said, “The meaning of service is at once subjective and generic, both elusive and in your face”. Unfortunately, he would still be waiting for someone to take his call off ‘hold’, and record his wise words for the world to read…

But that’s why the meaning of “service” itself is so important. Because of the fact that it can be defined in a million ways by a million different people. And they are all right.

The Premise

When you stay at Ritz Carlton, you are not just paying for the room to spend a night in. Or when you walk into your favorite mom and pop retailer a couple of miles down, you are not just looking to do your groceries. And when you grab your daily paper from the corner newsstand, there’s something more to it than subjective media BS.

These are three different customer service “touchpoints”, when we interact directly with the people who are selling us stuff or providing us a service. Clearly, at each touchpoint, we are looking for something that doesn’t exist in the store shelf. So what are we looking for?

As a traveller, you would be delighted to see a taxi waiting to take you to the hotel. The mom and pop wins over the local WalMart because the guy at the checkout counter knows your brand of cereal. And most often, the news in the papers seem less interesting than the juice in the small talk that the guy at the counter makes. And these are kind of what makes customer service take a step beyond and give customers more of the “intangibles”.

So, the Answer is…

Customers just do not want to be sold a product or a service. They want to be treated well, they want to be assured that they’ve taken the right decision and they have to believe that they are important. If you’ve done that, you’ve just provided your customers some ‘great service’.

There really isn’t a lot more rocket science to it. Service is that simple.

But then, why do businesses struggle when it comes to this aspect of their operations, when it has been repeatedly been proven to be the most important, sometimes even more significant than the product or service itself?

But if we know what to do, why do we falter?

It’s easy to shrug bad service off as something hardwired into the way we think about business. It is even easier to sideline customer service as a growth problem, organization-wide culture, lack of top-down initiative and bottom-up motivation. But really, promising and delivering a refreshing experience at every customer touchpoint is not all that hard.

So how do we provide refreshing customer service? How can we align our business processes to actually make sure customers are happy with us?
We will be looking into these questions and more, in Part 2 of the series.
You can subscribe to our RSS feeds or follow us on Facebook, Twitter,  Google+  & Linkedin to get the whole Spotlight series as-it-happens.

Social Customer Service - The New Helpdesk Mantra

It’s amazing to see how the help desk is inching away from headset-strapped agents, towards social media. In that light, a recent post in Forbes’ CIO insight by David Gutelius, chief social scientist at Jive Software, throws some perspective on “social customer service”.

If you are too tired to read through David’s post, its about the paradigm shift between customer care that had its nerve centers in old-school call centres, to this new age of customer service that embraces “social”. And when he talks about social, he means Facebook, Twitter, brand communities and every other touchpoint where organizations can forge a relationship with customers.

In short, David says today’s support software need to be built as ‘enablers’, giving customers the ability to look for solutions themselves, have a community with which they can engage and discover, set up knowledge bases that they can draw from, and so on.

And for all the right reasons, David’s post was like the ShamWow infomercial, for Freshdesk. Honest! In fact, a lot of David’s points were and still are the secret sauce that led to us create the first truly social customer service tool, Freshdesk.

But David magically seems to continue on our infomercial journey, highlighting the importance of analytics and insights into what customers look at and don’t look at. Like knowing what the customer needs so we can give her exactly the content she wants. It’s either a lucky coincidence or we are bang on target with our Freshdesk/Google Analytics integration a few weeks back.

To be fair, the post seems to downplay the effect of social customer support on the customer’s trust and brand-love. It’s awesome when you know you can vent your frustration and somebody is out there to listen and solve your problems. But overall, David seems to hit the nail on social customer service, it right on its Facebook-page-liking head!

Customer service is all about making the customer smile. And as Forbes puts it, ‘‘the best customer service team on the planet is a group of humans using social technology”. Well, man is an animal too!

The Freshdesk Easter Egg Hunt

Yesterday, when TheNextWeb wrote a really nice article covering our recent Google Apps integrations, we were honestly pleased. But what was even more awesome was a tiny little line they had mentioned :

“The company also has a sense of humour – note the staff names in this Google contacts integration screen cap. (I hope Gandalf takes my call…):”

Sure enough, there are a lot of smiles hidden in the screenshots on our website.
And with Easter coming in round the corner, we knew it was time for something a bit more special.

There’s a little easter egg somewhere on the screenshots on our website.
Find it in time for the festivities, add a comment on our Facebook page and allow us to surprise you with something Eggcelent.

Go on, what are you waiting for!?

Happy hunting & yeah, Happy Easter..!!

Time for some trivia: How do you change customer support from a chore into something over 4 million businesses are using every day, worldwide?

Alright, let’s take a fresh look at the question. How do you put the help desk into the email, address book, analytics and every day tools that millions of people depend on?

In case you haven’t guessed, here are 4 words for you:

Put it into Google!

That’s right. If your business is running Gmail for your emails, and if you have ever seen the wonders of Google Analytics, Freshdesk has something big for you. Push your seat back a little and embrace yourself for a wave of mind-blowing freshness… Ready?

Freshdesk is now the first and only help desk that is completely integrated with Google apps. As things go, we have not one, not two, but THREE radical integrations with some Google apps you use every day. Like Gmail, Google contacts and Analytics.

Now get your scuba gear ready and lets take a plunge into the Google pool:

Google Contacts

Freshdesk - Google Contacts Integration

So you have all your important business contacts distributed between your team’s accounts. That means you are going to have a lot of broken, out dated and duplicated info floating around. Plus you now need to manually add new contacts from your helpdesk to your inbox and back. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could keep all the contacts across your team synced up?

+1 to the Freshdesk – Google Contacts integration. Now you can access all your Google contacts from Freshdesk, add a contact from Freshdesk to Google (and back), and make sure that your contacts are synchronized across your entire team as well! (more of this story on our website here)

Gmail Gadgets

Freshdesk - Gmail Gadgets Integration

This one is fresh-i-licious-ly fresh! You can now get your help desk to sit right beneath every email notification you get from Freshdesk. The Freshdesk Gmail gadget shows you the entire ticket conversation between your support team and the customer. That’s the complete context of the ticket without leaving your email.

The gadget even pulls up contact information and all recent tickets from this customer, so you get all the context you need to start working on the ticket even before you even type in the first letter of your reply. (take a closer look at Freshdesk Gmail Gadgets here)

Google Analytics

Freshdesk - Google Analytics Integrations

And this one’s for the guys who want to truly add intelligence into their customer support.

What would you do if you knew exactly what your customers are looking for in your support portals? Replicate super-engaging discussions on your forums? Add solutions focussed on keywords your customers are searching with?

Freshdesk now lets you integrate Google Analytics into your support portal. That means you get to identify what your customers are looking for, how much time they spend on which posts, and what articles don’t engage your customers. So go ahead, fine tune your solutions and tailor your support portal to what your customers’… Just like you would your website! Read more about bringing analytics into your support here.

There, we’ve put it all out for you. Now all you need to do is go right in & start using it in awesome ways. You can follow the instructions on our Solutions Page here to get your Freshdesk Google-ready.

And do tell how you like it? We’d love to hear from you.

Best Web Tool

There are only a handful of things that can give you that high. Like a customer telling us how much he loves Freshdesk. Or a good review that comes as a pat-on-the-back. Or an award that celebrates all the hours we put in, and the thought behind it.

It really feels awesome to receive the ’Best Web Tool 2012′ award from WebhostingSearch.com. This award stands testimony to the value addition that a product(us!) offers to its customers. Check out the whole citation here.

Freshdesk Help desk integrates with JIRA Project Tracker

Freshdesk is delighted to announce our latest integration with project tracking tool JIRA. Used for issue tracking and project management by over 14,500 organizations in 122 countries, JIRA will enable your development team to take care of project and bug tracking, while the support team can ace all your customer communications.

With the new JIRA integration, when a customer reports an issue in Support, the Support agent can convert a ticket into a JIRA issue or link the ticket to an existing issue (if the issue is already open). When the issue is resolved or closed in JIRA, the agent can view the same in Freshdesk and update the customer with the fix.

Easy to set up and use, the integration will help your organization serve customers better by improving response time and minimizing information lapses. Customer support and issue resolution will get faster and awesomely efficient.

The integration is available with both the on-premise and on-demand versions of JIRA including the new JIRA 5.

Try Freshdesk’s JIRA integration today. You can sign up for the 30 day free trial here.
For instructions on how to integrate JIRA with Freshdesk, read our Solutions Page article here.

Every product team loves a good review. And so did we. Yesterday GetApp reviewed us on their blog, which we especially loved, because it captured all that’s new in Freshdesk pretty well.

The review of ‘Freshdesk 2.0’ covers: Email Commands, Email to Knowledge Base, Time Tracking & Enhanced Reporting. The review also talks about our free helpdesk for the single-man support team allowing small businesses to use all features at absolutely no cost (and that includes free support as well!).

Our Day Pass feature, in which customers can add occasional/temp agents starting at just $1 per day also gets a special mention.

GetApp calls the business case for Freshdesk ‘compelling’. Read the whole review here. If you’ve not yet experienced Freshdesk, do sign up for Freshdesk’s 30-day free trial and in the words of the GetApp reviewer, make life easy for your support agents!

Freshdesk scores 9/10 in GetApp's review