We love our product. We use it everyday internally for Muziboo and SupportBee. But, what s nicer is our customers loving SupportBee for the same reasons that we do. There can t be a better validation for the product. It was such a pleasure to chat with our customer Abine. There was so much resonance in our thoughts. And, not just that. Learning how our customers use our product has definitely helped us build a better roadmap and hence a better product.
The following interview is the first in the series of 'Why our customers love us'. If you are a potential customer wondering if SupportBee will work for you, read on to see how it works for Abine and what they love about us.
Prateek: Can you tell us a bit about Abine?
Abine: Abine helps internet users gain control of their online privacy. We believe that people have a right to privacy in their lives - whether in their homes or online. There is a huge difference between sharing personal information and having it taken. We've created Internet tools and services for those who want a say in how and when their information is used.
Prateek: Abine s big which tells me that online privacy is big. I always thought it was a geek thing to care about online privacy.
Abine: Online privacy is becoming more and more a public issue. It's almost a political issue today.
Prateek: Considering you have so many users, is your support volume high?
Abine: The volume is very high, and because we're a small company and we're all working from Boston, we can only be on chat on weekdays during business hours. Last week we had over 100 missed chats overnight and a few hundred over the weekend, but SupportBee helps us get back to those people quickly. Before SupportBee we were using Gmail, and there was no official ticket system in place.
Prateek: How many people do you have taking care of support full time?
Abine: Everybody here tries to chip in. But officially it is 5.
Prateek: And the other ones that don t do support full time, do they come in when you assign them a ticket or they just jump in when help is needed?
Abine: People just jump in when needed. What we really like about SupportBee is that if somebody just wants to jump in, they can go in the unanswered queue and pick off a couple of tickets and it will take it off the list for everybody else. It is nice to be sharing an inbox as opposed to having no control over that. People who don t know everything about everything can just jump in and just start answering requests that they know.
Prateek: 80% of the time you answer a ticket and it s done. That s why we made sure that it is taken off the list. Then you can focus on the other things. If you really want to keep track inspite of answering, you can star it or apply a label.
Abine: Exactly. That s another thing that we really like about SupportBee. You don t really have different statuses. Tickets just take care of themselves. We really really like that. It makes it a lot easier and we also like how you can add multiple labels to a ticket. When you know something is a missed chat and you also know it is important, it is very convenient to drop all those labels on it.
Prateek: Sometimes people are worried that since we don t have those artificial ticket states they won t be able to do support very well. You have seen that paradigm. You are a big team and you have decent ticket volumes. What do you think?
Abine: We don t really miss different states of tickets. There s really a need for just 2 states - answered and unanswered. You don t need partially answered, closed, started and so on. It can get so complicated.
Prateek: Do you involve your devs as well in support?
Abine: Yeah, almost everybody has an account. It includes devs too.
Prateek: This was one of the reasons we didn t want to price our product based on logins. We would like everybody to be involved in support. Do you extend support only to premium members or everybody?
Abine: We support all our customers right now.
Prateek: Do you have any feedback for SupporBee
Abine: We use almost all features that you offer. We would like to have a sort feature based on date and a bunch of other selectors. Also, the ability to CC and BCC. Nothing else as of now.
Prateek: Sure, we have those in the pipeline [as of publishing this post, they are implemented]
Our ultimate vision is to create a space where everybody can effortlessly collaborate real time on support. And, your feedback goes a long way in achieving that. Thanks team Abine!
