Based on feedback it has received from its customers, B2B customer support and help desk software provider TeamSupport has added Customer Families as part of the spring release of its support platform and upgraded ScreenView to support WebRTC.
The addition of Customer Families will help B2B support operations handle contacts more efficiently, providing greater visibility and access to all tickets within the entire organization, linking partner accounts across departments, locations, subsidiaries, and larger parent companies. It will enable support personnel to see not only individual trouble tickets, but to group contacts across all parts of the company.
This makes it easier to manage the entire customer relationship rather than just closing individual tickets.
"B2B customer service isn't just about resolving a single issue but the overall relationship with the entire company," says Robert C. Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport. "You can always resolve one issue, but for the larger business relationship, you want to see what the issues are across the entire company.";
Customer Families "gives the support organization a broader view to understand all of the issues across the whole company, which is critical," Johnson says.
After all, in a B2B context, the company, and not the individual, is the one paying the bills, he points out.
Customer Families can also be applied to the customer portal, enabling individuals at companies to access information related to support tickets and issues at other company subsidiaries, divisions, and locations.
The release follows growing interest for this capability from TeamSupport's clients, according to Johnson. "Clients have been asking for a feature that would allow them to more easily link their related customers together, and in response, we built Customer Families to make it simpler to manage relationships with businesses that have multiple locations and divisions," he says.
TeamSupport also added Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) support to its ScreenViewscreen recording feature. WebRTC is an open-source project for embedding real-time voice, text and video communications into Web browsers without requiring additional plugins.
TeamSupport's ScreenView enables users to share issues using screen recordings rather than writing out lengthy descriptions of their problem in text messages or trying to explain them during voice calls.
"The ability for the customer to show the agent exactly what is happening, with complete audio and video, is a very powerful tool," Johnson says. "It lets the customer get a lot more information about his problem in front of the agent without a lot of the back and forth."
In the same fashion, support agents can also demonstrate solutions to customers using the same video interface.
WebRTC also enables agents to share videos and other screen recordings with other members of the support organization for collaboration, and even store those videos to company knowledge bases for future use.
"If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a video is worth a lot more," Johnson says. "Video and audio creates a much more personal interaction."
"The ScreenView upgrade is a proactive move to keep our popular screen recording feature compatible with the latest versions of the Web's most popular browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer," Johnson says.