Support Gets Supported!

A little while back we took a week and cast aside our usual plans. Why? So the entire company could work on whatever the heck they thought would most help our Rockstar Support team be even more extraordinary.

And I know you’re all wondering with desperate concern WHAT HAPPENED? WHAT GOT BUILT? WHOSE LIVES WERE CHANGED FOREVER???

Well, let me tell you. Here’s a small selection of the awesome output from this week…

CALLER ID PSYCHIC

Okay, not actually psychic, but Daniel built this amazing web app that plugs into our phone system so you can check in on any currently active call, see who the customer is, get their whole history of communication with us, and all like that. It’s seriously awesome. Our customers get in the habit of talking to us, so its important for us that we can see what they’ve asked of us previously whenever they call in. With Call Psychic, we can pull all that up right there on the call.

LOLCATS SUPPORT BOARD

Casey (with a bunch of help from folks like Sellens and Sarmiento) put up a fantastic live status board that shows how many unanswered support emails we have, how many phone lines are in use, number of forum posts and everything. It keeps the Support team focused each day, and lets everyone know where they need to pitch in when the phone is ringing like a madly ringing phone. Most importantly, it randomly displays custom LOLcats with “motivational” messages to cheer the team on.

SCHEDGY

Support at FreshBooks is a rotating role. Scheduling FreshBookers into the many shifts each month is a huge pain — emails go back and forth as people forget their shifts, discover conflicts or want to change things up. So Ben Coe and Jeff Sarmiento built a drag-and-drop calendar app for scheduling support shifts at FreshBooks. You can just grab a FreshBooker, drag them to a day, and tada! Everyone gets alerted, shifts get filled, and FreshBooks phones get answered. Magic!

There were a number of other improvements, updates and exciting projects undertaken, but those are the ones having the biggest impact. Overall, FreshBooks will have saved thousands of hours this year in Support time just based on those three apps alone.

Asking our team to spend a week working on whatever they wanted to do was a bit of a gamble for FreshBooks. We weren’t sure what would happen, but we had faith in the team here and that they would jump at the chance to build solutions that really addressed key pain points for our Support team. And they did.

We’ll definitely be doing another Support Support Week down the road.