The Silent Partner saves 100 hours a month with HelpSpot

Teagan West

Customer Service Manager, The Silent Partner

We trust HelpSpot with our most important communication—and they've made a huge difference to our business.

Thanks to HelpSpot, we have total visibility of our support process, faster response times, and more satisfied customers.

CHALLENGES

Relying on a shared email account to organize customer support
Missing visibility into what staff were working on
Lacking accountability for resolving customer issues

SOLUTION

Seamless aggregation of all emails into a single workspace
Tools that make it simple to prioritize and assign queries, tasks, and tickets to individual staff
Filters and tags across dozens of vectors make it easy to track queries

RESULTS

+100hrs of staff time saved every month
Response times reduced to 30 minutes or less
Greater accountability
Happier customers

Challenges

Transforming disjointed support into more streamlined and organized communication

As The Silent Partner's Customer Service Manager, Teagan West ensures her team of experienced agents provide fast and efficient virtual support for clients in sectors including higher education, IT, ecommerce, and finance.

However, that's not the only hat Teagan wears. As one of The Silent Partner's most experienced employees, she's also on top of day-to-day operations, new client implementation, training, and quality tracking. So her hands are pretty full.

Before The Silent Partner found HelpSpot, Teagan depended on a standard, shared email account to handle customer inquiries and organize support.

Even with a talented and conscientious team alongside her, using a basic email platform raised the risk of losing track of requests or not responding quickly enough.

With its limited functionality, nobody had clear visibility of what others in the team were working on.

"It was so hard to have transparency: we'd have an inbox full of messages, but it was difficult to figure out what was being dealt with—and who was working on what query at a particular point in time" says Teagan.

Another challenge arose because many key resources were stored on local machines, with no global access.

"Email templates, and customers' knowledge books—which are used to ensure we provide consistent, quality information to customers—were stored on individual machines," says Teagan. "This raised the possibility that different versions existed on different machines and in the worst scenario if somebody's machine was out of action, we could lose access to valuable resources."

Inefficiencies with the existing system didn't end there. Without the functionality to assign specific people to specific requests, there was a lack of accountability for resolving customers' issues.

Further friction occurred because The Silent Partner had no clear history of how issues had been handled.

"This became a particular challenge if an issue needed to be escalated to a manager or other department," says Teagan. "With no easy way to see the full history of customer interactions, we risked providing a bit-part handover that could potentially increase back-and-forth with customers and cause them frustration."

While The Silent Partner was consistently delivering a great service to its clients, an outdated and unscalable email system was causing unwanted issues and inefficiency.

The Silent Partner urgently needed a robust digital tool that could help them automate and organize more of their customer support operations, while streamlining communication both internally and externally.

Enter HelpSpot.

Solution

Easy-to-implement help desk software streamlines support and provides total issue visibility

The Silent Partner set out to find a software platform capable of turning sometimes disjointed support processes into more organized and meaningful interactions. And all at a reasonable price point that suited their growing business.

They found all of that with HelpSpot.

While other help desk platforms were complex and costly, HelpSpot provided just the right amount of functionality for The Silent Partner to accomplish its goals.

They began a 21-day free trial and found immediate value in HelpSpot. Its user interface was surprisingly straightforward and came with an easy learning curve that meant it was quickly adopted by the whole team. It was the ideal match, so The Silent Partner signed on as a customer.

HelpSpot seamlessly aggregated all emails—including support tickets, customer service, reception queries, billing queries from customers, and sales leads—into an easy-to-use workspace.

From there, Teagan created buckets for each category of work, which transformed the team's workload from a proverbial mountain into bite-size chunks that felt more organized and manageable.

"HelpSpot's interface made it easy for me to navigate through everything and work out what was highest priority,” says Teagan. "If I could solve a query right away, I'd do it there and then. If it required deeper work, I'd reply to let the customer know we were working on the issue and then assign it to individual inboxes for the staff."

Assigning work in this way was something their previous platform couldn't handle—and proved a game-changer.

"HelpSpot made it so easy to prioritize and assign queries, tasks, and tickets to whoever's best-placed to tackle them,” says Teagan. "All requests are assigned to one person, so it's crystal clear who's responsible for each one.

"Suddenly, I had total visibility into what's in my inbox, what's been assigned, and what still needs to be picked up.”

HelpSpot also provides filters and tags across dozens of different vectors that help Teagan track what's assigned to different staff, how many tickets they have open at any one time, and what stage each ticket is at.

"As I go through, I always like to jump in and see if there's something that's maybe been neglected or hasn't been picked up in a timely enough manner. I'll then go in and see if there's anything I can do to lift some of the work off their plate and move things along,” she says.

HelpSpot provides exactly the features Teagan and her team need to improve organization and workflow, including:

Notes — agents now log notes about every interaction they have with a customer, meaning they have complete history and visibility of every issue. Teagan says this feature has been 'life- changing' for The Silent Partner. It makes life so much easier answering customer queries and handing issues over to different colleagues or departments. It also enables them to pinpoint any training needs for staff and follow that through with supervisors or managers.
Ticket management — because every ticket is clearly marked with who's responsible for it, staff are more accountable for issues and nothing falls through the cracks.
Subscribing to a ticket — when Teagan needs to hand work over for a colleague to work on, this feature loops her into all communications on that particular ticket. The agent doesn't have to worry about CCing her into emails, because it's all automated.
Customized templates — with HelpSpot, The Silent Partner creates tailored templates that make it easy for the team to provide consistent responses to common queries. The templates require the smallest of tweaks to personalize, meaning staff service customers faster, with no compromise on quality.

In addition to using its comprehensive array of pre-built tools and functions, The Silent Partner also worked with HelpSpot's Professional Services team to create customisations that unlock even more business value.

One of the most pivotal customizations was the creation of Customer ID numbers, which agents have to enter before they can update any issue. This means that at the click of a button, Teagan and the team can see every email exchange they've ever had filtered down to that client ID.

And that's another game-changer.

Before, if a customer said they'd sent a request that hadn't been actioned, Teagan's team would manually carry out different searches and jump in and out of multiple inboxes before they could confirm what had happened. Now, they just search the Customer ID and everything's there in front of them, fully visible and with zero chance of error.

With total visibility of the team's activities and progress—and automations that accelerate client support— Teagan and her team have more time to focus on what really matters.

"The less you have to think about and the more automated you can make your processes, the better you can focus on the actual customer service you're delivering,” she says "That's really what we strive for here and it's one of the things I find HelpSpot is really great at.”

Results

Faster response times, 100+ hours a month of internal resource saved, and happier customers

With HelpSpot providing the trusted backbone of their customer service operation, The Silent Partner has increased the speed and quality of customer responses. In fact, most inquiries are now dealt with inside 30 minutes!

Teagan attributes this to increased accountability among staff for resolving issues, combined with agents having instant access to high-quality templates—all made possible by HelpSpot.

"Because staff are now assigned and responsible for every ticket, issues are handled faster and resolved quicker,” says Teagan. "They know that if it's in their inbox, they're solely responsible for dealing with it.”

HelpSpot has unlocked significant time savings for The Silent Partner, too.

Teagan estimates the team saves several hours per day—or +100hrs a month—thanks to the total visibility, improved communication, filters, and functions that HelpSpot provides. All of this adds up to improved business efficiency; not to mention more time for Teagan to spend training colleagues, improving operations, and helping scale the business.

Customer satisfaction has also improved since The Silent Partner implemented HelpSpot.

"We get feedback all the time, saying: 'You're amazing. Thanks so much for following up on that so quickly. I love the response. Your response time is great',” she says. "HelpSpot has made a huge difference for us.”

Before HelpSpot, Teagan would sometimes feel overwhelmed by the scale of managing so many queries across so many different areas. Now, it's so easy to group, delegate, and resolve every ticket, the mental load has been lifted.

The benefits of using HelpSpot extend to The Silent Partner's sales team, too. Because they can consult a complete client history before jumping on a sales call, they're fully informed right off the cuff. Anecdotally, Teagan says this has had a positive impact on The Silent Partner's sales and revenue.

She recommends HelpSpot without hesitation.

"HelpSpot is super easy to use and useful for everything from customer service, to sales teams, to project management,” she says.

"It provides transparency across your team, automates frustrating manual processes, and puts everything you need in one spot—so you know nothing's going to be missed or lost.”

Teagan concludes: "We trust HelpSpot with our most important business communications. They're reliable, provide great service whenever we need it, and help us achieve our business objectives.”