Adzerk Team Blog

This article is a review of Adzerk’s implementation of Assistly as our CRM solution.  My goal is to share insights into our needs, goals, and how we’ve utilized the Assistly platform to help us track, monitor, and improve our customer support efforts. 

Why we chose Assistly

For starters, it is cheaper for us based on how big we are and our current customer base.  We also like the idea of supporting other startups (or at least they were before getting bought out by Salesforce).  But mainly we simply needed something we could implement quickly to manage our growing number of customer inquiries.  Quickly implementing a product is something you can’t get from some other similarly priced and easy to use CRMs.

Our goals and requirements as a support department

Most important and above anything else is that we want to make it as easy as possible for customers to communicate with us in ways that are easiest for them.  This means Twitter, Facebook, Email, and Chat.  At first glance, per Assistly’s marketed appeal is they facilitate communication across all channels in a single application.  Not many options out there do this natively, and do it well no less!

Secondly, like many support departments, we needed a tool that allows us to collect all the case data we report on such as the nature of the customer inquiry.  Whether the customer’s main reason for reaching out is for information or “how to” questions, reporting a problem/bug, or giving general feedback, Assistly lets us do this through Labels and case specific Custom Fields.  We track top level Labels like the ones mentioned but also specific labels for what part of the application they’re referring to. 

Lastly we need the ability to report on the data that we track in the most effective way possible.  Unfortunately there aren’t many applications that can contain data and manipulate it as well as an excel pivot table but Assistly does a pretty decent job of showing you some top high level metrics in their reporting/analytics tools.  However, it is easier for us to keep reporting metrics in excel to manipulate it easier.  Salesforce blows most competition out of the water in terms of generating reports based on all specific case fields and customer data.  I hope with the new relationship with Salesforce brings many great features and abilities in terms of reporting.  For now, manual processing is working fine (but as we grow I don’t expect it to be sustainable).

How we use the app to generate our own reports

In some ways Assistly’s reporting is even beyond our needs at this point.  We’re a small department and are not really concerned with some of the default reporting metrics built in such as the Time to First Resolution of a case (a built in case status) or anything to do with a case priority (a priority number determined by rules you set for various factors like which channel the case came from or the number of followers a twitter account has that a tweet mentioning @Adzerk has).

What we do is utilize case filters to choose the criteria of cases that we want to view.  We choose the hour range to filter by for any new cases that exclude labels such as spam or test (if we receive spam emails or are testing something) and this gives us our weekly case volume.  We then manually go through it and document the following items in an excel document:

• Account Name or Trial Customer (listed in the case subject for easy view so we don’t have to open the case to see who it was)
• Email, Chat, or Phone call (done with labels instead of the built in channel feature)
• Top Level Labels
  • Info/How To
  • Problem
  • First 30 Days Inquiry
  • Feature Request
  • Feedback
• Feature Specific Labels
• Number of Customer Cases
• Number of Trial Cases
• Number of Trial Customers Spoken with 

From all of this data tracked weekly we can calculate stats such as:

• Average Cases Per Week (Customers & Trial Customers)
• Case Per Customers (Customers Only - # of customers that contacted us versus how many we have that week)
• View trends using line graphs for all of the above.

What we actively monitor

Using case specific custom fields and an external excel document we look at each case as we close it and think about what would have solved this case before the customer had to ask for help.  This includes things like a help/how to document, a change in the application interface, or a new feature.  We document these things in our excel document, give it an ID, and add that ID to the case’s coordinating custom field.  This way we can actively see in excel how many cases are counting towards existing or new topics, which helps us prioritize issues we need to address first.

Overall opinion of Assistly as a CRM

The Assistly CRM solution is pretty snazy and by all means worth a test run to see if it can help you with your needs!  While we don’t use all the features and use others differently than how they are intended, I can definitely see how this is a more cost effective solution if you’re a much larger company and need to manage all the different channels in which customers talk to and about you.  You may not get the robust reporting tools you need right out of the application itself but there are plenty of ways to work around some of these limitations and still get to the bottom line of helping your customers.  

Overall opinion of Assistly as a company to align yourself with

These guys practice what they preach!  Their responsiveness to your questions is great, they are open to feedback, they are transparent with issues that come up (check out this post).

If you haven’t checked them out or given them a test run, you are really missing out on a solution that could potentially be perfect for you.