1. How big is your “helpdesk team” and how many customers do you have?

Our team is small. In total, there are only 15 of us. Everyone pitches in everywhere, but we have three people whose primary focus is attending to customers’ needs. We have tens of thousands of users, world-wide.

2. What’s the main reason, you care about your customer support services?

A company may have a fantastic product, but if their relationship with customers is poor, customers will find an alternative. It’s how much care you take with the customers that really sets you apart as a business. Genuine, speedy, and friendly customer service helps people know they’re dealing with a business that highly values its customers. One in four new customers are sent to us from an existing (happy) customer. So even just from a purely economical viewpoint, our customers mean everything to us.

3. What kind of metrics are you using to measure customer satisfaction and performance of your agents?

Several months ago, we started using the NiceReply system to help us gauge our customers’ satisfaction. The rating system allows customers to give instant feedback concerning their interaction with our agents. We geek out when customers give perfect scores to our team members again and again. Those ratings help us know where we’re doing a good job and how to improve if ratings are slipping.

We elected to have users choose if they were sad, indifferent, or happy from the interaction. Keeping the choices simple and less subjective was key for us.

4. Do you have any special motivation programs for your helpdesk agents?

We actually don’t offer any special programs. We just hire very carefully. Each of our help desk agents was a YNAB user before they worked for us, so they’re very passionate about how YNAB has helped them personally, and they’re dedicated to helping others have that same experience.

5. What, in your opinion, is the future of helpdesk systems?

The speed of the reply is the number one determinant of customer satisfaction, so any system that helps reps respond quicker is the future.  Response time across various channels will eventually come into play (Twitter, Facebook).

6. What’s the most important virtue a helpdesk agent must have?

Well, it’s a tie between two things. The first is understanding. We only hire people who are YNAB users themselves. That way, they have first-hand, invested experience with the software. They relate to the customers’ concerns and have a thorough foundation to go off of when resolving issues. The second is genuine friendliness. It’s important for customers to know that we are prepared to give them a pleasant experience. That means hiring “naturally happy” people.

7. Do you have a funny story from your helpdesk that you would like to share with us? (We know that there’s a lot of them

We sent an email out to our trial users telling them to ping Steve (our customer service rep) and he could get them an extension key for their trial.

To our delight, many customers interpreted our email differently than we expected, and thought Steve’s name was Ping Steve: “I was told to contact Ping Steve so I could get a trial extension?” We had a good laugh

FreshBooks is planet Earth’s leading online invoicing and simple online accounting service for small businesses. Since 2004, FreshBooks has helped over 3.5 million people take the pain out of running their businesses. Dedicated to designing extraordinary customer experiences, FreshBooks helps people focus on what they love to do, instead of their paperwork.

1. How big is your “helpdesk team” and how many customers do you have?

To us, supporting FreshBooks customers with knock-your-socks-off service is just a part of who we are. We have 13 Support Rockstars supporting our customers and are trusted by more than 3.5 million users worldwide.

2. What’s the main reason, you care about your customer support services?

Support is the cornerstone of FreshBooks and an important part of what sets us apart.

We understand that our clients are busy, they’re running a business, usually by themselves or in a small team, and their time is both limited and precious. When they have a problem, it needs to be solved quickly. They do not have time for hold music or waiting for an email reply the next day. When they call FreshBooks, the phone is answered right away, and we find solutions as quickly as possible.

3. What kind of metrics are you using to measure customer satisfaction and performance of your agents?

FreshBooks measures customer happiness by attaching a feedback form in every ticket the support team works on. This allows the team and the Support Rockstar to learn from positive and negative customer experiences. Having happy customers is crucial for FreshBooks and getting immediate feedback allows us to maintain our high standard of customer service.

We also use internal reports to ensure that the support load is manageable and that it is equally distributed across the team.

4. Do you have any special motivation programs for your helpdesk agents?

We have a motto at FreshBooks, which is “Execute on Extraordinary Experiences Everyday”. When any member of the company displays a behavior that matches this motto, their colleagues are encouraged to recognize them with a gift card. We call these “Values Cards.” The support team also gets recognized when they reach a particular milestone in terms of cases resolved, longest call, etc.

5. What is, in your opinion, the future of helpdesk systems?

While we can’t quite predict the future, we can safely say that our support team will never be replaced by robots or outsourced!

6. What’s the most important virtue a helpdesk agent must have?

Empathy.

Empathizing with customers and clients is one of the most important things we can do to offer the best service possible. Stepping into their shoes allows us to see things from a different angle and helps us really understand the customer’s pain.  Everyone on our support team embodies this virtue and it is even part of our company-wide values!

7. Do you have a funny story from your helpdesk that you would like to share with us? (We know that there’s a lot of them

Surprising and delighting customers is something that is encouraged at FreshBooks. Just a couple weeks ago, a support team member opened a ticket that was an auto-response message from one of our customers who mentioned in the message that he is away to spend time with his new baby boy. Instead of just deleting the auto-response message, the member of the support team decided to send this customer a lamb blanket for the baby.  It’s small things like this which help us foster a long-term relationship with our customers.

(+ funny story)

How big is your “helpdesk team” and how many customers do you have?

We are currently 4 persons on the helpdesk team, but expanding

What’s the main reason, you care about your customer support services?

We believe it’s the best way to make people come back and tell their friends about our service. But even without that, it’s just fulfilling to make people happy

What kind of metrics are you using to measure customer satisfaction and performance of your agents?

We use assistly as our helpdesk system, which perfectly integrates with nicereply. In assistly, we can measure the volume of incoming cases, and nicereply gives us metrics to see the quality of our responses.

Do you have any special motivation programs for your helpdesk agents?

We are running an internal competition based on the ratings from Nicereply, which is fun for everyone.

What’s the most important virtue a helpdesk agent must have?

To care. With that comes a great motivation to really understand what people are asking for and helping them solve the problem.

Do you have a funny story from your helpdesk that you would like to share with us? (We know that there’s a lot of them

Yes. We have a live chat on our website. A chat came from a customer who mentioned he bought a slide package with the wrong credit card and asked if we could refund the amount and make a new purchase with a different card. Since you can’t buy the same product twice, this wasn’t possible. I have been preaching the principle of exceeding expectations, so I thought this was a good chance to show the support team how. I took over the chat and suggested him that he could that we would do something else: We can refund the amount, and the you can go ahead and buy another slide package of your choice. The rest of the dialogue went like this:

Customer: “What? That doesn’t make sense. Then you are essentially giving me $100 for free.”

Agent: “Yes…why doesn’t it make sense?”

Customer: “If you give away your slide package, you want earn anything”

Agent: “Exactly but you’ll probably come back to Slideshop next time”

Customer: “That’s insane. Thank you so much. I will tell my friends about this”

This kind of experiences really makes your day.

For starters, please provide us with some basic information about your company:

This is the part I care about . Usertesting.com is a service that helps website owners discover where users have problems or get stuck using their website. We do that by building large panels of users, average people, who will record their computer screens and voice while using the website. Website owners can even say, I have a travel site and I want to see ten people that are planing a trip in the next 6 months. It’s a powerful way website owners to discover why people leave their website. We’ve been around for 3 years and we have thousands of customers.

How big is your “helpdesk team”?

There are currently four agents and we are adding 1 or 2 more. Daily, they handle hundreds of emails, live-chats and phone calls. We also have an automated response system.

What’s the main reason you care about your customer support services?

We think it’s a competitive advantage to have great customer support. Almost all of our growth comes through word of mouth or referrals. Having a high quality customer support team increases the number of referrals for us. It helps us get new customers and to retain current customers.

What kind of metrics are you using to measure customer satisfaction and performance of your agents?

In addition to using Nicereply, we contact first-time customers to ask them how their experience was and if we can help them with anything else. We have a standard of replying to emails within 2 hours. We also do random reviews of e-mails sent to customers.

Do you have any special motivation programs for your helpdesk agents?

We don’t have individual rewards in place. We did however reward everybody on the team when we received one hundred happy ratings by having smiley cookies and a celebration. (That’s a great tip for other companies using Nicereply)

What’s the most important virtue a helpdesk agent must have?

To be a good listener. That’s my number one required attribute. But it’s really hard to pick only one, because there are 3 or 4 others which I feel are important too.

(Darrel Benatar, usertesting.com CEO)

We thank usertesting.com for finding time for us and for sharing insightful tips with our readers. Keep up the good work!

Get to know your customers, good or bad
We have started implementing some customer tracking algorigthms to help you keep track of your most satisfied and dissatisfied customers.

Show your customer satisfaction with pride
There’s a great new way of reaching out to your customers and showing off how much you value your relationship: The public profile!

Let your customers spread the love

You can now turn on the sharing options after your agents have been rated. Your customers will be able to let the whole world know how awesome you are. Set it up in your rating page settings.

Have a nice reply! We’re looking forward for your feedback, please get in touch directly via mail with your ideas and suggestions.

Lets say we already have a Live Agent account at http://example.ladesk.com

We’ve already signed up for Nicereply and created account at http://www.nicereply.com/qualityunit

To make both applications to communicate together, we have to set Agent IDs to be the same in both applications. Login to Live Agent and navigate to Configuration -> Agents and edit the Agent you want to setup in Nicereply. Copy the Agent ID from LiveAgent URL and paste it to Nicereply ‘Username‘ field found at Settings -> Edit Person. The user ID in LiveAgent can be found at the end of that page’s URL. It is something like this:

index.php#Agent;{“id”:”ef55df75″}

Do this for all users you want to setup.

The next step is to activate the Ticket Link feature (Settings -> Ticket link) to link every rating to a ticket at LiveAgent. We put the ticket URL into “Ticket system URL” field, e.g. http://example.ladesk.com/chat/?cid=<TICKET_ID>

Setting up your LiveAgent

To let your customers to rate your agent’s replies, we are now going to add the rating link to your email templates. In LiveAgent navigate to Configuration -> Email templates and modify templates named ‘Agent Replied’ and ‘Compose Message’. Live Agent enables you to use various variables in templates, which means it’s quite easy for us to construct a rating link.

To rate my reply, visit this link please:

http://www.nicereply.com/qualityunit/{$agentId}/{$conversationId}

NOTE: You can do the same with username set to firstname-lastname style, but in that case, you have to use this type of link:

http://www.nicereply.com/qualityunit/{$agentFirstName}-{$agentLastName}/{$conversationId}

And that’s it!

We have now successfully connected Nicereply with LiveAgent. Your customers will now be able to rate your LiveAgent emails and you’ll have the ability to easily evaluate performance of your helpdesk team and see what ticket every rating relates to.

For starters, please provide us with some basic information about your company.
SoundCloud is the leading sound platform on the web. The community is full of all types of sound creators and collectors, this expands from field recorders and radio talk shows, to sound designers and musicians — the SoundCloud community is robust and full of awesome people.

1. How big is your “helpdesk team” and how many customers do you have?

There are 5 of us answering emails, and we average at 250-300 cases/day.

(soundcloud support team)

2. What’s the main reason, you care about your customer support services?

We love our community and we want to help them out as much as we can. Support cases shouldn’t be seen as something to simply process and move on, they should be seen as valuable interactions, these are our awesome members

3. What kind of metrics are you using to measure customer satisfaction and performance of your agents?

Aside from using NiceReply, we also use Assistly’s software, which allows us to track our average response time. We try to be as quick as we can while providing personalized answers/responses.

6. What’s the most important virtue a helpdesk agent must have?

Genuine empathy. If you can imagine you’re in that person’s shoes, how they’re feeling and take that into consideration when answering, you got it! It’s all about treating people how you would like to be treated if you were in their situation.

To use the new feature, just log into your account and you’ll see a new tab Customers.

If you want to know more about the feedback that a certain user has given, just click his name and you will see his detailed ratings.

As this is a beta feature, we are still working on it and we are continuously improving it. In the next following weeks we will be also publishing more exciting features into Nicereply.

Basically the only thing you’ll have to do is replace the links in your emails. What used to be this:

How good was my reply?

http://nicereply.com/COMPANY/AGENT

Will be this if you are using thumbs:

<b>How good was my reply?</b> <br/>
<a href="http://nicereply.com/COMPANY/AGENT/?s=1">
  <img alt="" src="http://m.nicereply.com/inline/thumb_1.png" />
</a>
<a href="http://nicereply.com/COMPANY/AGENT/?s=10">
  <img alt="" src="http://m.nicereply.com/inline/thumb_10.png" />
</a>

And this if you have faces option selected:

<b>How good was my reply?</b> <br/>
<a href="http://nicereply.com/COMPANY/AGENT/?s=1">
  <img alt="" src="http://m.nicereply.com/inline/face_1.png" />
</a>
<a href="http://nicereply.com/COMPANY/AGENT/?s=5">
  <img alt="" src="http://m.nicereply.com/inline/face_5.png" />
</a>
<a href="http://nicereply.com/COMPANY/AGENT/?s=10">
  <img alt="" src="http://m.nicereply.com/inline/face_10.png" />
</a>

Important – be sure to replace the COMPANY and AGENT in these code snippets in order for the signatures to work. Also, if you have Nicereply integrated with a help desk system, be sure to add the third ticket id parameter in the rating link, pretty much the same way you did when first setting it up.

When you are finished, your email should contain these nice clickable links that will direct your customers to pre-selected rating pages.



If you want to stretch your HTML skills, you can of course play around and try different font sizes, use your own images, etc. We hope you find these ideas helpful and we are looking forward to your feedback and ideas!

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