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I run a small tech service business with 3 employees. We provide managed IT services and all manner of other custom enterprise hardware deployments; network infrastructure build-outs, VoIP phone installations, consulting/advising, resale of Microsoft software agreements, etc. Our days are a mix of: - Taking calls/emails from customers and scheduling appointments with them - Immediate handling of "fires": Calls about equipment down, someone has deleted something important, etc - Ordering/receiving/unpacking/processing-contents of a crap ton of packages - Meeting with clients about their needs - Remembering when you told the client they'd have that item/estimate/call back you promised them - Waking up to looking at an inbox with 40 new items since last night mixed in with the 20 you didn't get handled yesterday and not readily knowing what the priority ones are. Handling all this stuff on the concierge, turn key level that we do for the 100+ clients we serve is daunting. We're proud of how well we do it but I can't help but feel we can improve our efficiency greatly with the right tools. We have been in business for a decade and have done fairly well. We aren't a booming record breaking success but we've increased both our gross billings and net profit nearly every year we've been in business and managed to secure employees who enjoy working here and want to do so for the long term. Despite that success here are some problem scenarios we hit recurringly enough to make me feel there must be some ways to improve: - Presently if a customer calls in or emails in and needs the attention of another employee we send them a Slack message. If they don't respond we hope we remember to send them an email. We hope they see one of these things and handle the customer in a timely manner. We have no verification they've done so besides asking them later. This, as you can imagine, has days it doesn't work so hot and customers get frustrated. It also ends up in a lot of conversations like: "Why did that take so long? customer x is pissed! I emailed you AND Slacked you" "Well I was with a customer and didn't see it because there were then 100 emails and slacks that happened after you sent that". - We each have a Microsoft Exchange email address on the company domain name. It's solid, professional email but doesn't seem to quite hit the spot when it comes to an item coming in to just my mailbox that someone else on the team could have handled before I could get to it. Often customers don't know who to email so they either just email one of us (who may well be too busy to help them fast enough) or email all of us (resulting in us all having to make sure we don't all send different responses). There has got to be a better way to do this crap that doesn't involve a stupid ticketing system? Maybe there are nice ones that don't feel like more work to get to work how I want than writing one myself? We weren't really tickled with ZenDesk or FreshDesk in trials. - We have single Microsoft Exchange calendar we all share. This never screws up but is entirely standalone - nothing gets on it that we don't manually enter. Some integration would be nice? - Tracking ordered items is done entirely manually on an as needed basis. This repeatedly effs things up. We either end up surprised when something arrives we forgot we ordered and now don't have time that day to handle or a week later going "um..crap..that never showed up" and scrambling to figure out why. Nothing we do is new, novel, or even inherently complicated on its own. Something we've never quite nailed down is how to keep all of this straight and organized. We've tried various "to-do" programs and help desk suites. None really seemed to tie it all together. In my dream world there's a program that does the following: - Allows you to put in a "to-do" item with both a due date and a color coded priority, assigned to either "anyone" or a specific person - Allows display of those to-do items' due dates on the company calendar - Tracks packages from our suppliers (perhaps automatically scraping the tracking numbers) and makes a task/scheduled calendar event for the employee who ordered those items on the day they're supposed to arrive so time is reserved to resume the order waiting on those parts the very day they are to arrive. Having time already saved to handle an incoming part could speed up completion of customer projects waiting on parts considerably. - Some kind of easy conversion of emails (we use outlook/exchange) to tasks with a scheduled due date. For example: Client emails and says I want a price on X by X date. Should be able to make that a task. - The ability to push message or make some kind of alert team-wide when a high priority concern comes in would be nice. Some things could just go on an employee's calendar or to-do list. Some things are flaming emergencies and need to be handled NOW without going on a Slack/Email/Phone call chase to try and hunt someone down to tackle the issue. In essence I want everyone to be able to pull up a portal or open an app at the start of a day and know what they've got to work on that day, how important it is, what parts are inbound, and when each project is due. This software would not need to: - Do accounting or invoicing. We have quickbooks. - Track time or do payroll. We have Tsheets+Gusto. - Be a full blown ticketing system with email integration and a help desk for customers to log into blah blah. We find those too cumbersome when demoing them and the customers we tried them with were left not liking the extra steps involved. They don't care about their ticket number or automated responses. They want the real, actual response to their request to be completed asap. - Be a chat program. Slack has been the bomb for this. I understand every business is different and that this is far from a complete case description of what we're doing or what we need. Please do ask questions or throw stuff at the wall here. I'm fully open to something that breaks these concepts or to be convinced that I should be doing something differently. I'd just love to hear from anyone out there about what software they use to improve productivity of their team, especially if the logistics of what you do seem similar to what we do. There are an ocean of Software as a Service providers out there catering to businesses but I've not yet found anything that seems to really nail what we do without being cumbersome, despite it not being incredibly unique. Hoping here someone can either turn us on to one or several that can ease some of our efficiency holdups. Thanks in advance. Fake edit: Maybe we just need a drat good secretary?
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Apr 19, 2016 17:45
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That is a lot of things you need to get done. From what it sounds like you guys could benefit from a project management system/CRM. Have you looked at Zoho?
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Apr 19, 2016 20:28
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Yeah, it is a lot. It's getting frustrating to have been cobbling together our productivity software from so many different vendors. I hadn't looked much into Zoho. It looks like they offer a bunch of different services that work well together if you get them all from them? I'm not entirely opposed to that but my hesitation is on the traditional ticketing system. Our interaction with customers is just too personal for that. They don't want to feel like they're getting automated responses or that their email to us is being tracked by an issue number. The magic we've sold, and been able to maintain for the most part, is that our customers contacting us feel like they're emailing/calling their own IT guy down the hall..except they don't have one because we're more affordable for businesses too small to need full time IT. We've managed to give them the feeling of an in-house tech without the impersonal "take an issue number and get in line" feel of most external IT services. That's perhaps the heart of our issue. Most contract IT services use ticketing systems because it's effective. I'm opposed to them, however, because they seem impersonal and to add a lot of steps to the customer interaction. I'm happy to be shown a way they aren't. The primary concern we've got is prioritizing, really. We get through a crapton of requests every day but sometimes find at the end of the day something came in earlier that really should have been hit ASAP because it was a bit more of an emergency than everything else we'd been doing through the day. It is very difficult to ask customers to prioritize their own issues, however. Some of our customers think every question they have is a flaming world ending calamity and others are so calm mannered they write us a casual email with a subject like "hope you've been well" to inform us that someone just cut their utility lines outside and they have 30 people standing around unable to work. Maybe I'm looking for a virtual assistant type service? Someone to screen and prioritize all the requests. What would they put them into then? A todo system? There are a hundred of these and I'm sure there is probably one I'd like. Thanks for the thoughts. Continuing to be interested in any more anyone has.
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Apr 19, 2016 20:55
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try highrise? https://highrisehq.com/features/
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Apr 30, 2016 05:00
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Thank you. Genuinely. That actually looks quite useful and I'm going to demo it. This was exactly what I was hoping for from this thread - apps/services I'd never heard of before. There are literally tens of thousands so trying them all is impossible. Any further suggestions for ones worth my time are entirely welcome. I'd still love to find something that would automatically scrape tracking numbers from amazon, newegg, ebay, streakwave, ingram micro, and a few other places we order parts from and show us on one screen what's inbound, what has arrived already, etc. Any such thing exist? I've had real trouble finding anything of the sort.
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May 2, 2016 04:20
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I think Jira works well with Slack? Don't quote me on it but it may be worth researching.
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May 2, 2016 19:38
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chedemefedeme posted:I'd still love to find something that would automatically scrape tracking numbers from amazon, newegg, ebay, streakwave, ingram micro, and a few other places we order parts from and show us on one screen what's inbound, what has arrived already, etc. Any such thing exist? I've had real trouble finding anything of the sort. Edit: actually fedex has some APIs and stuff, I've never used them though. If you do all shipping through fedex you may well find that easier than scraping emails. My Rhythmic Crotch fucked around with this message at 18:26 on May 3, 2016 |
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May 3, 2016 18:22
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another option: Slack https://slack.com/ edit: oops I see it was suggested without a link
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May 5, 2016 14:59
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Oh yeahpaperchaseguy posted:another option: Slack Oh yeah, it's in my OP, even  We really love Slack. Probably the best software/service addition to our productivity in the past year.
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May 5, 2016 15:29
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As a caution, this sounds like you guys have distinct problems and are trying to address it into one tool / service. However, your advantage really is that you are a small company and people are pretty open to different tooling and changing certain habits, so that's good for you guys. On the other hand, I'll name a few tools that I've been evaluating to try to address problems that overlap with yours:
Asana may also be worth a serious look for you since it checks all the boxes for you seem to want, but I haven't tried it myself and I've heard some grumbling about how its UX is not intuitive to some people. In your situation, I would try to use a separate tool aimed at rapid customer support request responses as possible (not necessarily Zendesk, sometimes) and have one person assigned as the dedicated interruption handler to take the requests. This should do the double duty of making customer support more streamlined for your customers as well as easier for your team to handle. For off-hour requests, you'll want an integration in that service that will call someone potentially - something like IFTTT or Zapier combined with a service like Twilio or Plivo to call or text your on-call person. Whatever shared Exchange calendar system that's used is really not good for doing much besides sharing meetings on a calendar because calendars are really poor for project planning at a glance when you have more than one or two things happening. But still, with Pivotal tracker and JIRA both I think you can sync tickets / tasks to a calendar if you really wanted it. I really have to emphasize that handling crisis tickets should not match the same workflow / UX as your general task management. PagerDuty is rather expensive for a lot of companies, but its UX is much closer to handling when things go wrong and even a few seconds can be a game changer, especially at 3 am. Only terrible, dog-slow dinosaur companies can accept customer-facing services being down for hours at a time, and using the same tools and workflows they do for incident management is one of the surest ways to bring yourself down to that level of non-performance.
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May 10, 2016 00:27
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necrobobsledder posted:Stuff Thank you. This was a really well composed response with some good points to chew on. Specifically insightful to me was the concept of a dedicated interruption handler and separation of systems for emergency tickets vs regular production. I'll be pondering those two points for a bit.
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May 11, 2016 07:09
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Have you looked into Salesforce? My company uses it to do everything you've mentioned, mostly out of the box though we did do a far amount of customization to add some additional functionality in a couple areas, and use some third party apps from the appexchange. It's not the cheapest CRM but having everything run out of a single system has been worth it.
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Jun 14, 2016 04:40
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