The Syncplicity Blog

News from Syncplicity Support

Posted by Rachel

At the end of June, I joined the support team as a Support Guru. This role is a unique challenge for me – no existing dedicated support team, low ticket volume, but technological needs that are detailed and complex. This blog series will follow me as I build the support team and services at Syncplicity to match the needs of our users.

What are your first steps?
One of the questions asked in my interview was “What will you change here in your first 30 days?” My answer? “Nothing.” I plan on spending my first 30 days with Syncplicity learning about our users, investigating the product, and learning about support patterns and current support tools. After that 30 days, I will be able to start moving support in a direction that is in line with the Syncplicity user base and company direction – but I know the learning doesn’t stop at 30 days. It is critical to have a constant presence with the support queue and user base to make sure that we continue to grow with our user base and their needs.

What is your hypothesis for how support will grow?

• Support Ticket Tracking
  Support ticketing volume is fairly low at Syncplicity – about 20 tickets a day. However, we do have an active forum and Twitter account. Because the nature of our support interactions require more one-on-one communication, it’s time to move support into a standard tracking system rather than a public forum. To do this, we will use a highly customized version of Salesforce to handle support interactions. We will also have a dedicated support Twitter account to help troubleshoot and announce status updates to our user base.
• Support  Business Hours
  The support team should remain relatively stable for the next few months and 8×5 support should cover our bases. However, after assessing the user base, we may want to offer first 8×7 support (covering international users and east coast users), and then finally offer 24×7 support as our product becomes mission critical in an organization.
• Professional Services
  Syncplicity’s current user base is very much an early adopter group – which means they like figuring things out themselves, or turning to a community-based support model for assistance. As we acquire more customers, we may offer training, customization, and engagement services to serve the entire breadth of technological knowledge and ability of our users.
• Documentation
  One of my first tasks at Syncplicity will be to centralize our FAQs and documentation into one user manual that is easy to search, update, and collaborate on with the Syncplicity team.

So, stay tuned as I start my new role at Syncplicity. Watch the company grow along with the support and services team!