

Growing Your Business: Time-Effective Customer Interaction - steiza
http://blog.olark.com/growing-your-business-time-effective-customer

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bcx
I think this article does a good job sparking discussion. I.e. What do you
guys do to balance working on your product verses talking to customers? How do
you manage customer service in small teams?

~~~
lsc
there's two angles here. 1. "how do you deal with support" which is to say,
how do you respond to potentially hundreds of questions a day and not drop
them, and 2. "how do you decide how much time to spend on support, vs. other
things"

As for 1.

I use RT, but frankly it doesn't work that well for us. We're all primarily
email people. Nobody wants to use the web frontend

I've worked other places that just used a shared IMAP box; if you were dealing
with a customer, you pulled them out of the shared IMAP 'support' box and put
it in a shared box by your name (that way, if you were sick the next day,
someone else could cover for you) and dealt with it. I'm seriously considering
abandoning rt for that solution.

As for 2, personally, I think I often spend too much time talking about stuff
rather than doing stuff. But, talking to people requires a different kind of
energy from coding, so I'm not so sure that it's eating into productive time.
I mean, for me, it's almost a social break. (I mean, if I did it more, it
wouldn't be so much of a break; I'm at least moderately introverted.)

~~~
bcx
What's RT?

We took WuFoo's advice and just used one big shared Gmail inbox (similar to
your approach), with one person monitoring the inbox every day. Most day-to-
day issues can be handled by anyone on our team.

~~~
lsc
RT is one of the most commonly-used ticketing systems in the ISP business:
<http://bestpractical.com/rt/>

I think that even when sharing folders it's important for everyone to have
their own account. it's confusing if you have multiple people speaking from
the same address. You might be able to do that with gmail by modifying the
sender address (with a shared IMAP box with everyone having their own client,
the sender address can be set in the client config.)

~~~
donw
I've done more than a few installs of RT over the past decade, and if I never
have to again, then I would say that my life has been successful.

