(+ 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!

Read more on their Community blog »

From our own experience and hard data behind, we’ve realized that the customer usually gives feedback either if he’s extremely happy with the service, or really angry. The star rating system great, but in some cases, it makes the customer think too much. That’s why we’re announcing two new rating options – thumbs and faces. For now, these are represented with numeric scores (1,5 and 10 for faces and 1,10 for thumbs).

These new rating options can be easily set up in Settings -> Rating page and have the same customizations available as the star ratings, including colors, backgrounds and the language of the page.

Apart from these awesome new options, we’re trying to ship small improvements and options regularly, and here’s a few we’ve turned on only recently that you might have missed:

• Redirect after rating – You can set an URL if you want your users to redirect to a special page after they have rated your support, perhaps a special offer or a discount as a token of your appreciation to your customers. This can be also set up in your rating page settings.
• Anonymous ratings – If you feel that asking for your customer’s name is not that of a good idea, you now have an option to receive your feedback anonymously. Also, set it in on your rating page settings.
• More API Methods – We’ve added a bunch of new methods to our API that you can play around with. Go have a look!

We hope you’ll find these news useful for your support and be sure to follow Nicereply on twitter or join the Facebook page for new exciting things to come. And they sure will, and very soon. We’d love to know your opinion about these new features so feel free to leave a comment or contact us directly by email. Have a nice day!

Setting up Nicereply

First of all, you’ll need to set your Nicereply agents’ usernames to their RT usernames. Usernames in RT can be found under Configuration -> Users. That will give a list of
usernames, full names, and email addresses. The screenshot shows the screen after clicking on one of the users.

Next, we have to activate the Ticket Link feature (Settings -> Ticket link) to link every rating to a ticket at RT. We put the ticket URL into “Ticket system URL” field, in this case it’s http://rt.example.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=<TICKET_ID>. Make sure to change “rt.example.com” to the location of your RT installation.

Setting up Request Tracker

Navigate to Configuration -> Global -> Templates. Some of you may have customized your correspondence template for each queue, in which case you’d have to make the change to each queue-level template as well.

Insert the following to the correspondence template just above your signature. Important! – make sure to replace the “my-company” in the url to your company name in Nicereply.

{
   return '' unless $Transaction->CreatorObj->Privileged;
   my $id = $Ticket->Id;
   my $actor = $Transaction->CreatorObj->Name;
   RT::Interface::Web::EscapeURI(\$actor);
   "Please rate my reply: http://nicereply.com/my-company/$actor/$id";
}

If you want to track ratings for individual replies instead at the overall ticket level,
use this instead:

{
   return '' unless $Transaction->CreatorObj->Privileged;
   my $id = $Ticket->Id;
   my $trans = $Transaction->Id;
   my $actor = $Transaction->CreatorObj->Name;
   RT::Interface::Web::EscapeURI(\$actor);
   "Please rate my reply: http://nicereply.com/my-company/$actor/$id%23txn-$trans";
 }

That’s it!

We have now successfully connected Nicereply with Request Tracker. Your customers will now be able to rate your helpdesk emails and you’ll have the ability to easily evaluate performance of your helpdesk team AND see what ticket every rating relates to. Don’t forget to try out the integration thoroughly, and if there’s any problem, please let us know.

We’d like to thank Thomas Sibley and the whole team over at Best Practical for their wonderful help with this integration.