Case Study: BGW Group - Interview
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John Kenyon - Interview Information Technology Manager |
| The following is from an interview conducted with John Kenyon, Information Technology Manager, regarding his company's experience with HelpSpot. Customer since December 2008 |
Tell us a little about your organization
The BGW Group of companies is made up of a number of businesses all working within the building industry. Electrical and Plumbing Wholesale are its foundation businesses, from which the group has evolved to include 6 additional other business units. These Australian owned and operated companies strive to achieve superior customer service utilising experienced staff and quality products. With its diverse range of companies the BGW Group can service a large range of industries including Electrical, Plumbing, Home Automation, Security, Home Improvement and Retail. This also allows the BGW Group to specialise in different divisions of these industries including Mining, Industrial, Oil and Gas, Government, Commercial, Residential and Retail.
Which department(s)/business unit(s) use HelpSpot?
HelpSpot was initially implemented for our IT support team and because it worked out so well the Marketing team now uses it too.
About how many requests do you process weekly?
Our IT team currently provides support for over 70+ locations throughout Australia, receiving approx. 200 new support requests every week and increasing steadily.
What do you see as the unique needs of your group and how does HelpSpot support those needs?
With the BGW Group of companies growing at such a rapid rate we needed a system that was reliable, scalable and flexible enough to deal with end user requests. We have requests arriving from a variety of sources, so it is crucial that our team members effectively coordinate and communicate their activities. Using HelpSpot we have been able to centralize everything and drastically improve the workflow. Our previous ticketing system was sluggish and quite limited (no email integration, customer portal, or automation rules). It wasn't even web-based! HelpSpot has addressed all these short-comings in a simple and effective manner, without breaking the bank.
How has HelpSpot improved your customer service?
HelpSpot has helped our IT support team better manage requests and as a result increased the overall efficiency of the department. We have been able to improve our speed to resolution, enhance our communication with users, and increase the knowledge of our support staff through sharing information.
Which features have the biggest impact on staff productivity and how you manage the support operation?
The email rules, pre-defined responses, filters, request reminders and knowledge books, just to name a few... it's hard to narrow down because HelpSpot serves us so well. Overall the clear assignment of requests and request history has had the biggest impact on productivity because there is no confusion on who's responsible for each request and the current status of each request.
What's been your support staff's feedback on HelpSpot?
Everybody loves the simplicity of HelpSpot. The overall layout and functionality is great, plus with every HelpSpot upgrade there's always at least one new feature our team finds valuable. The general comment about HelpSpot is "it makes sense".
Tell us if/how you're using the APIs, live lookup, or portal templates to customize your HelpSpot installation.
The live lookup function is excellent and allows for an easy way to query any existing system for customer information. We have it setup to quickly search our Active Directory which saves us time entering staff information for requests. Also the ability to customize the portal templates is something we could not do without! We have integrated system alerts, the online status of team members, and additional useful web pages for our users.
Please feel free to share any additional thoughts on your experience with HelpSpot.
We looked into a few other proprietary and open source ticketing solutions but none of them came close to what HelpSpot offered in terms of features and flexibility. HelpSpot has run flawlessly for us, the install/upgrade process is easy and the performance is great. I am very pleased with the quality of software and service we have received from Userscape.