Tools of the Trade: Behind the Scenes of High-Growth Support Teams

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  Francisco Fisher
  

It takes a great strategy and the right tools for your company to meet the demands of fast growth. Take it from members of Stripe, Ipsy, Eventbrite and Airbnb who took to the Heavybit stage as part of Stripe’s “Lightning Talks” series to share their success stories of putting the right software behind their user-support systems.

Streamlining Support at Stripe

Stripe is a software platform for building an internet business and accepting payments online. It’s what Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Kickstarter and thousands of others use to sell to anyone, anywhere, and in brand new ways. Stripe’s global support team sees thousands of tickets per day and relies on communication tools like Slack to keep members connected.

Stripe is growing quickly, but is still really collaborative. “We all talk to each other all the time,” Moníca Brown of Stripe User Operations says. Her team can provide better support to their users when they’re plugged into what’s going on across the company.

Ultimately, Stripe’s goal is to solve users’ problems as quickly as possible so they can get back to focusing on what matters — running and growing their own businesses. “Getting members of other teams on a call will allow the user to interact directly with the person who’s actually going to solve their problem” Brown says.

Advantages of phone-based support include:

• An opportunity to connect customers with fast inter-departmental solutions
• Less time and fewer number of contacts needed to reach a resolution
• A more personal way to address user issues and concerns

You can up your phone-based support game with help desks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, HappyFox and Kayako, to name a few

Fostering a Close-Knit Community at Eventbrite

The live-event marketplace Eventbrite has a service team that sees an average of 40 thousand contacts per month. With 500 international employees, the company turns to communication tools like Slack as well as Google Hangouts for face-to-face interactions with their team.

“Getting to see someone talk really changes the way that you understand how they work,” says Vivian Chaves of Customer Experience.

Aside from interactions among the team, the Eventbrite team reviews cases using Salesforce’s collaboration tool Chatter. Similar tools include Huddle, Redbooth and eXo Platform.

Keeping it Consistent at Ipsy

Ipsy is the world’s largest and most passionate beauty community. The community is centered around a beauty sampling service called the Glam Bag and premier content produced by Ipsy and its partner creators. Ipsy ships to over 1.5 million subscribers every month.

The team stays on the same page with one another and shares tone and style guides, as well as other training materials, using an internal communications system built using Atlassian’s Confluence.

“Because customer service is downstream from everything in the business, you need to have those connections to help you solve problems as they arise and also to make you aware of those problems before you’re seeing it in the queue,” says Nykki Yeager, Head of Customer Care.

Personalized Responses at Airbnb

Airbnb’s global customer service team clocks 180 thousand interactions per week at their laid-back “Belong Anywhere” offices. Employees can and do stay on top of social media outreach famously with tools like Hootsuite.

Citing examples in his presentation with Customer Experience team member Annette Margolis, Keau Katsunuma shows how a fast, personalized response to a customer issue via Twitter can turn out to be a “really fun way to take a negative situation, turn it around, and make a promoter.”

Other social media managers and tools include Crowdbooster, Social Flow and Sprout Social.

What tools give your team an edge in user support? Let us know @heavybit.