Case Study: Slicehost

Case Study: Slicehost

	Matt Tanase - Interview Slicehost Co-Founder
	Since starting out with 5 licenses in February 2008 Slicehost has rapidly grown to an installation of over 30.

Tell us a little about your organization

Slicehost is a hosting service built for developers. We provide affordable, scalable servers for people building and running web applications. In October of 2008 we were acquired by Rackspace and are now part of the Rackspace Cloud offering.

Which department(s)/business unit(s) use HelpSpot and about how many requests are processed weekly?

The Slicehost Support team uses HelpSpot to communicate with our 20,000 plus customers. Several hundred requests per week and growing.

What do you see as the unique needs of your group and how does HelpSpot support those needs?

When building Slicehost, we wanted the support workflow to be as simple as possible for our customers. For most people that means email. Customers depend on our service 24x7x365 and we built our support team to handle their needs.

Currently we have 20+ people working around the clock, on different shifts, in various locations, helping customers all over the world solve problems fast. HelpSpot is the tool we use to meet this challenge. It's our virtual hub for addressing incoming emails, researching existing problems and passing issues between team members. From a growth perspective, the reporting tools allow us to estimate future support loads in order to meet our customers' needs.

How has HelpSpot improved your customer service?

When we started Slicehost, Jason and I handled all support requests. A year after we started, Paul (now in charge of our support team) joined as our first employee. Even with 3 people, we found ourselves stepping on each others toes and worrying about how to efficiently handle the support load. HelpSpot was the third tool we tried and we haven't looked back. Now our team is much larger and customer service is the foundation of Slicehost. HelpSpot allows us to quickly process and respond to incoming requests. Fast, simple support means happy customers.

Which features have the biggest impact on staff productivity and how you manage the support operation?

Hard to single out just one because HelpSpot fits perfectly with our workflow. The ability to document a problem and 'actions taken' for other team members is crucial. The filters for open tickets provide a real-time snapshot of our support issues. And the iPhone interface lets' us handle escalations from anywhere.

What's been your support staff's feedback on HelpSpot?

We don't get much feedback because it just works!

Please feel free to share any additional thoughts on your experience with HelpSpot

We built our business and reputation by providing excellent customer support. I wanted to give Slicehost customers the same things I expect: speed and simplicity. HelpSpot not only helps us meet those two goals, but has allowed us to scale our support team as the business grew (rapidly).