Product Management

Collaboration: The Key to great customer service.

Luis Ortiz

— 3 min read

This post is from our Agile vault. Articles previously published on the SoftwareDevTools Blog that we're re-publishing. In that blog we discussed everything from Agile adoption, distributed work, and the Atlassian ecosystem.

You can do your research. You’ll find that everyone agrees with Catapult Labs:

When it comes to customer service culture, collaboration is key.

Every other site talks about service agents collaborating with each other and solving problems together. However, if your service is in the software industry (Our maybe your core service is not, but you have a software dev team), then you’ll most likely find that agent to agent collaboration is easy enough as long as they are on the same team.

The real funnel comes when there’s need for collaboration between different teams, in this case: between Support and Development teams.

Imagine a customer of yours calls in because he found a minor front-end bug (even though he most likely won't recognize it as such). How long does it take for that information to be sent accurately to the developer who’s gonna work on it; then for the confirmation to be sent back to the support agent? You know it could be up to weeks. For one single issue that the customer probably expects to be handled right away (Because of the simplicity of the request).

There are several synchrony issues in these interactions:

Tools:

First of all, both teams will be using different tools. Your customer support team will be using a helpdesk system like Freshdesk, and your development team will most likely be using an issue tracking system like Trello. So the best thing that you can do to synchronize your teams is to have them both use the same tool, or you can use Catapult Lab’s Trello + Freshdesk power-up. It’s an integration that updates info from Freshdesk's tickets into Trello boards and vice-versa. This will allow for seamless collaboration amongst teams. Reducing the time it takes to solve a ticket and reducing the noise caused by it.

Definition of Urgency:

What the caller and the support team might consider a small request that should be done quickly, for Development, that’s a low severity issue and does not require immediate attention. Here I can give you a ton of examples, but you get the idea. Both teams will have different perspectives regarding the urgency and therefore, the resources needed to attend it.

Language:

Believe it or not, Devs use a language that is very different to that vocabulary we are used to. Also, a customer support representative might address a bug or a story as a ticket. Many other differences might make this collaboration a bit harder.

Time Zones:

We’ve seen this more and more every time. The support team is located in one side of the world, and the dev team is in a completely different time zone. This will only slow down communication, and unless there’s schedule overlapping, you will have issues going on for days, just because of the communication problems.

You need to do your best to alleviate this factors and avoid any miscommunication problems, and foster intra-team collaboration without forgetting about inter-team collaboration. Remember, this might be key to having a happy customer base.

Don't forget to check out Catapult Labs's website to find more tools that will make your team more productive.
We focus on tools for remote teams, trying to overcome the location and time difference. We have been working on a bot and tools for Remote Agile Teams like Agile Retrospectives for Jira or Agile Retrospectives for Confluence and Scrum Poker for Jira or for Confluence.

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