5 Tools for Successful Customer App Support

I have had the privilege of starting my career at Stackify. Being fresh out of college and working with customers who were much more experienced in the industry than I was, taking on the role of providing support was a bit overwhelming. Learning how to support such a complex tool has been exciting and challenging, but one of the first things I learned about supporting our customers at Stackify is that communication between the team internally is key. The engineering team does a great job of focusing on our users everyday, but they couldn’t succeed without a solid toolkit.

These are the 5 most helpful customer support tools we use here at Stackify:

1. Zendesk

We use Zendesk for both managing communication through support tickets and creating Stackify documentation via Zendesk’s Help Center. Having our ticketing system and documentation site so tightly integrated is a big plus as it allows our team to see what customers are searching for prior to submitting a ticket. Knowing this information helps us identify what content we need to improve in our documentation. Improving self-service through our documentation & FAQ sections is a major goal of the Customer Success team. Zendesk is an integral tool to fuse customer questions & our documentation together.

2. JIRA

The developers use JIRA everyday to help coordinate all the work items they need to accomplish, but the Customer Success team also uses this tool to help report bugs, improvements, or feature requests reported by customers. Through the Zendesk-to-JIRA integration we can easily link a ticket to a work item and assign it to a developer. This works well when the support team needs to track an issue from creation to resolution. We also use JIRA boards to help prioritize what issues are critical and need more attention and to set expectations on when a certain feature will make it into a release.

3. Slack

Slack is a great tool that we use 24/7 at Stackify. Even though we probably post way too many GIFs and emojis for our own good, Slack has greatly improved communication between our team. It allows us to easily collaborate through different channels that we have set up for different purposes. With our support team, for example, we have both a #Support channel to track incoming tickets and a #Tier-2 channel to escalate issues to the rest of the team when needed. We even use Stackify’s Slack integration to capture Stackify Alerts so that we can monitor any production problems that arise before they are reported.

4. Growing our Internal Knowledge Base

Using those tools mentioned above together allows us to keep a historical record all support issues we have ever come across. Having a searchable knowledge base to draw from for answers to different questions has been a great resource for our support team. Having these resources available to everybody leads to quicker ticket resolution times and helps us avoid researching something more than once.

5. Stackify

Last but not least, using Stackify at Stackify has helped us greatly when it comes to supporting our customers. We have a separate Stackify environment dedicated to monitoring s1.stackify.com. Using our own tool to cover monitoring has been a great help. As a Support Engineer I can search for errors happening in Production, and if there is a specific client facing an issue, we can search logs in our monitoring environment to see what might be going on. Not to mention it’s a driving force behind many of the awesome features you know and love!

Support at Stackify is a team effort and these 5 tools are what we rely on everyday to bring customer issues all into one place. It has been pretty cool to see Stackify grow the number of customers like it has. As the volume of traffic from customers has increased over the years we have learned to utilize these tools to maintain customer success.
Which customer support software could you not live without?

James Michaelis

Product Support / Stackify

Author

Alexandra

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