Levers: Bringing Fluidity to the Freshdesk portal

If the Zappos’ and Apples of the world have taught us anything, it’s that a customer or user should be a company’s foremost business objective. Effectively supporting Levers’ customers with fast responses, feedback and requests is just as important as providing seamless functionality! While we had a number of options in sight, we decided to go with Freshdesk to build a user experience that focused on our key customer service objectives: uniformity, accessibility and interoperability. While functionality was the driving focus behind Levers’ decision to choose Freshdesk as its primary support ticketing system, we also put great weight into Freshdesk’s ability to create a seamless integration with Levers’ design and semantic structure, carrying over our website and app experience into our support portal as well.

And here’s how we did it:

1) Uniformity: Helpdesk Rebranding

When we approached the needs of our users, we had a few non-compromises in mind. First and foremost, we didn’t want our users to feel like they were going off-site to fill out support requests. So rebranding our support portal and experience was pretty critical.

We started with the basics, like uploading our logo, modifying the portal URL, favicons and email forwarding. Then we backed up all the page templates in a GitHub repo for safe keeping and started in on the important stuff – layout customization.

Liquid templating (the framework you will be using to customize the support portal in Freshdesk) is extremely well documented. As long as you are familiar with loops and variables, you should not have too much trouble deploying it. Sublime has a built in Liquid client too, which made our coding process much easier.

The most important part of rebranding was getting the Helpdesk portal to reflect our unique brand/appeal down to every single CSS class. Since Levers has a defined brand and semantic CSS structure(plus our own Google font), the design process was fairly easy.

After that, we moved onto editing the portal page by page, adding and customizing our stylesheets, changing the layout and options, and sanitizing the Bootstrap framework .

Here’s a link to the current Levers helpdesk.

2. Interoperability: Creating a Single Sign-On Experience

Single Sign On (SSO) is an understated, but powerful feature in Freshdesk. Instead of having another set of login credentials, we decided to employ SSO quietly in the background, and load the right information into our support portal. Reducing the need for another set of login creds has added way more benefit to Levers than we initially thought.

A side effect of SSO is all tickets now are attributed to the right user requesting help from within the app. This is valuable since users sometimes provide a different email address in their support requests than what is registered in Levers user records. Since Levers has a simple support request form, it used to be difficult to reconcile support emails with the correct user accounts before we enabled SSO in Freshdesk.

3. Accessibility: Getting Feedback from inside the Levers App

Our third big requirement was to make sure the support process was “there” when users needed it, but unobtrusive and almost invisible otherwise. At the end of the day, we didn’t want to disrupt a user’s workflow while they were working within the app.

Freshdesk’s feedback widget sits in a corner of our app that most users don’t even worry about until they have a problem. But when they want to get in touch, the pop-up allows users to submit a service request, add screenshots and search for documentation all from within the Levers app.

Most businesses only hear from about four-percent of dissatisfied customers. Not only is the ability to easily request support important to addressing issues, but it’s the best customer retention tool out there. Eliminating the barriers to request support with Freshdesk’s feedback widget pop-up should create a more convenient way for users to reach out; and so, making customers happier!

About LeversLevers is a SaaS forecasting and simulations platform, currently supporting forecasts and simulations from Google Analytics data. While this is the equivalent of rocket science even for an advanced digital marketer, Levers tries its best to keep things simple and beautiful with an aesthetic dashboard, easy-to-use interface and substantial supporting documentation.