Stop depending on email and spreadsheets. Implementing a Customer Support Management tool like Freshdesk can be a great leverage factor to improve how you support your customers and gain insights into their needs.

Acquiring customers is important and can be really challenging. Keeping those customers and ensuring they're happy is every bit as critical to the success of a business. There are many ways we seek to delight our customers-- product quality, service quality, responsiveness, the list can be quite long. With such a variety of ways in which customers can and want to interact with our businesses, it's important that a company make some intentional decisions to facilitate, track, and manage these support interactions. Customer Support Tracking software options abound, but there are a number that tend to consistently rise above the fray through a combination of ease of use, depth of features, and effectiveness in their purpose. Freshdesk is one of those options.

Freshdesk is a Customer Support Management software, offered in a SaaS model, for businesses looking for an effective way of tracking and managing their customer support interactions. Founded in 2010, Freshdesk exists for the purpose of providing SMB companies with an easy to use online set of tools for managing customer support. The product has put its focus very specifically on Support, and that focus has helped guide their development around a core set of really valuable and useful tools for Support. Originally centered on support ticketing, Freshdesk has expanded the scope of the tools to include multi-channel support management, team collaboration, customer self-service tools, APIs for customization and integration, and a great set of reporting and analytics tools. The combination of capabilities positions Freshdesk well in the industry, and makes it an appealing option for a number of business models and sizes.

GRAYBOX has strong feelings about customer support, in large part because it's an important part of our own business model. Your customers reach out to you for support in a moment of need, and the company that can effectively help them in that moment can more easily earn, and keep, customer loyalty. Conversely, the company that ignores or ineffectively meets those support needs will erode that loyalty, and likely make it more challenging to acquire new customers in the future. Freshdesk offers a set of tools that empower companies to provide great support to their customers in a number of ways. First, Freshdesk consolidates your multiple channels of support under a single roof. That allows a company to report seamlessly across the multiple support touch points, and to provide consistent responses to those customers regardless of where they chose to engage from. The Freshdesk customer self-service tools are a great way to enable customers to answer their own questions, and feel independently empowered to resolve their own questions at their own speed at the times convenient to them. Where a specific requirement is missing, Freshdesk has created a thriving Apps marketplace through which a company can augment and add-on to their software with existing apps and integrations to third party tools. This allows a company to even further unify their operations and communication in a single place so your support team can be even more effective. Finally, Fresh Desks offers a great set of Reporting and Analytics tools to provide your business visibility into the effectiveness of your support, look for repeated hot spots to proactively address customer needs, and consistently evolve your processes to ensure your customers stay happy.

Freshdesk is great for companies that are moving out of a low-sophistication support toolset, like managing support in Emails or spreadsheets. These tools are often the first ones a Company uses because they fit seamlessly into the existing workflows of the team. Freshdesk does a great job of standing in for these tools by integrating with email solutions and providing more robust tracking and documentation capabilities than spreadsheets. Freshdesk is also a great fit for the company working with an existing Customer Support Management software that is not meeting their current needs. There are a lot of Customer Support Management tools on the market, and many of them fall short of the offerings of Freshdesk. Freshdesk starts to feel challenged when you need a more integrated picture of your customer interactions in order to effectively support their inquiries. As an example: If your support team needs access to outstanding invoices and payment history, order, fulfillment, and return details, details on products purchased, or manufacturing and shipping status info, you may end up with either multiple duplicate licenses to disparate systems, or a large integration project for the sake of unifying enough data within Freshdesk.

Understanding what your support team does -- and doesn't -- do is a critical first step in effectively supporting your customers. Beyond that, centralizing communication, creating a meaningful knowledge base, automating processes to eliminate manual steps, and establishing a series of rules and interactions that will be effective all require planning and diligence to execute. The team of consultants at GRAYBOX has been through this exercise many times in the past. Whether for our own internal needs, or for those of our customers, GRAYBOX can bring the experience and valuable opinions to the table to ensure you evaluate and select the right set of tools for your business, and that the execution of the project helps you better service your customers moving forward.