Saving Time and Money with Syncplicity
Justin is a user who started out using Syncplicity Personal Edition, but quickly saw the value in rolling out Syncplicity Business Edition with his team of mobile realtors.
InfoWorld’s Cratchit Hall of Fame recently interviewed Justin on his Syncplicity usage, and in this article Justin shares how Syncplicity helped his team manage their critical work files from home, the office, and on the go while saving his company money and the frustration of manually syncing their files:
“[Syncplicity] has saved us a lot of money. It allowed us to work efficiently. We were pulling our hair out before. This product has taken a lot of the ‘painstaking’ out of syncing and collaborating.”
Have a story like Justin’s? We’d love to hear it – leave a comment below!
An Addition to the Syncplicity Team!
I have the extreme pleasure of introducing the Syncplicity community to Karr Yutuc! Karr is joining the Syncplicity team as a Tier I Support Guru.
I have been fortunate enough to work with Karr in the past, and was thrilled when she applied for the support opening I posted on oDesk. Karr will be covering the support queue early weekday mornings. Bringing Karr on board is one of many steps towards faster responses to your support emails, providing more support services, and bringing another friendly voice into the support queue.
Please join me in welcoming Karr to the Syncplicity team!
Join the Syncplicity Support Team!
We’re looking for an experienced Syncplicity user to join our support team as a Tier I Support contractor. The hours for this position are 6am-10am PST Monday – Friday.
Tier I Support triages basic questions in the Syncplicity support queue. In this role, you’ll get to work directly with users to ease their frustration, solve their problems, share their excitement, and spread the word about Syncplicity. You’ll work closely with the Syncplicity engineering team to resolve issues (which means you may get earliest peeks at new features!) and help decide the direction of the product.
If you’re serious about helping users with Syncplicity and you’re ready to join a great team, please email rachel@syncplicity.com with a cover letter, resume, and availability.
Syncplicity User Manual
By joining the Syncplicity team, I came in not only to a new company, new colleagues, and a new work schedule (man, I love sleeping in!), but also to learning a new tool. As a new user to the Syncplicity product, I was able to see a huge gap in the Syncplicity product: documentation. As I installed and ran the Syncplicity client for the first time, I was faced with a big question – now what? We knew that I wasn’t the only user with this problem – we found that about 30% of our users stop using Syncplicity right after they installed the product.
Syncplicity has an FAQ and it also has a user forum. The FAQ is helpful in evaluating if the product is right for a user (and for finding out how tall Ondrej, our VP of Product & Platform, is), but doesn’t guide a user once the product is up and running. The forum is helpful for troubleshooting and sharing ideas with other Syncplicity users, but not for basic questions. As I answered emails and forums posts, I started documenting tasks in Syncplicity – from the very basic “How do I reset my password?” to the more advanced “I’m getting error messages, how do I find out what’s wrong?” issues.
Last week, manual.syncplicity.com became a public site. This user manual is in its early stages, and it’s not perfect. You’re bound to find a few typos and a lot of glaring omissions. But this is a growing document – every day, with each support question I answer, it changes, updates and becomes more comprehensive. Syncplicity users have the chance to tell me how it can improve – we currently have a feedback survey running on the site.
So please vist the Syncplicity User Manual. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like, what could be explained better, what I spelled wrong – anything! This is a document meant to help our users, so we want to make sure Syncplicity is getting user input on what this site should contain. I hope to hear from you all soon!
Customer Satisfaction Survey
We recently surveyed our Syncplicity users to see how we are meeting their needs. Based on the survey outcomes, we want to share how we plan to address each of the below issues in our upcoming product development schedule.
How many people does your company employ?
Two thirds of respondents told us they worked in companies of 1-10 employees. Syncplicity is aiming to provide a solid, reliable syncing and collaboration tool for small and medium-sized companies. We’re happy to help small and medium sized team users work more closely together
What would you likely use as an alternative if Syncplicity was no longer available?
This survey result made it very clear who are competitors are. When you know who the competition is, it’s very easy to know where you need to do to be better than the other guys. As Syncplicity’s Support Guru, I’m here to promise you that while other companies have great products, my personal goal is to blow them out of the water with Syncplicity’s customer support. Customer support is just one of the areas we plan to amaze you in, and next week we’ll talk more about how we plan to compete with other companies.
How easy is it to set up and use the Syncplicity service?
Only a third of respondents told us that setting up Syncplicity was extremely easy. While an additional half of respondents told us it was still easy, our goal is to improve these responses – A new online user manual (look for it next week!) is one of our first steps towards better documentation and instructions.
Please indicate the importance you place on the following Syncplicity offerings:
Three items received a “High” ranking in response to this question, and we are happy to see that our user requests are in line with our product roadmap.
- Ability to add extra storage: If you’re using extra storage, we take this as a sign of success – you’re using our product a lot, and we should make it easy for you to continue doing that! We are currently investigating ways to make it unbelievable easy to expand your storage space with just a few clicks.
- Large file support (>2GB): Most files fall well under the 2GB size limitation, but that doesn’t mean we’re giving up on stretching those limits. We are investigating the synchronization of even larger files to make working with Syncplicity appropriate for all your files.
- Centralized user management and administration: I’m pleased to say that the last item is already something we are actively working on. If you are a business user, we’d love to have you join our beta team and give us feedback. You’ll get early access to the new tools, the chance to help us develop this new product, and free service in exchange for your feedback. To join in, email sales@syncplicity.com and tell us a bit about your business and how you might use this tool in your organization.
What would you like to receive from Syncplicity on a regular basis?
Our users let us know that announcements about the product – service messages, new features, and company updates – were important. We’ll improve our blogging and Twittering schedule to keep our users up to date.
Listening to our users is a critical and intentional act in everything we do at Syncplicity. Based on this survey, 75% of respondents would recommend Syncplicity to a friend, so hopefully that means you like what we’re doing. Thank you for everyone who completed the survey!
News from Syncplicity Support
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!