Supporting our customers with Crisp

Key features that make all our lives easier

Shared conversations

At SMILE, we have a chat service on our own website, chat available in the backend of most of the websites we build, and a dedicated form for support requests. All of this adds up to a whole lot of messages coming in from several different places. Now that we use Crisp, rather having to jump between platforms to manage these communications, all of our support tickets and chat conversations are available in one central location.

Beyond saving us the headache of trying to remember who said what where, Crisp allows the whole team to have access to the latest information in one place — they can even join in on a conversation if necessary. Among other things, this means that ongoing discussions don’t fall to the wayside if, for example, someone is out of the office.

This is proving useful for more than just keeping track of support queries. We’ve begun starting some of our more general conversations with our clients through Crisp. Whether this is clarifying a request for a piece of development work or opening a discussion about a new service offering, Crisp puts the conversation in front of the right people at SMILE without the nuisance of email cc/bcc issues (and the inevitable failure of someone in an email chain forgetting to press the all-important ‘reply-all’ button).

Private notes

Perhaps my favourite feature in Crisp, private notes makes it possible to chat with teammates right inside a conversation with a client. I can direct a question to someone in the team by mentioning their username in a private note. We can then discuss the question at hand, all in the context of the original conversation.

One drawback to private notes: it’s dreadfully easy to slip up and send a private note to the main, client-visible conversation — sometimes a cause for slight embarrassment!

CRM

As an extra benefit, Crisp stores contact details for clients centrally, acting as a handy CRM (client relationship management) tool in addition to everything else. Conversations with each contact are logged in their record, making it easy to view a history of what’s been discussed.

At the moment we’re still relatively new to Crisp, but there are lots of great features beyond the core tools we’re using.

Ratings

One of our goals is to actively seek feedback on our support service. We want to offer our clients the best possible service, and Crisp can help us ask our clients for a rating so we know where we stand. We may also use Crisp to send out a survey to clients who have contacted us in order to include their opinions in our discussions about how to improve SMILE support.

Analytics

Crisp keeps track of several metrics from across the platform. We’re hoping to use Crisp analytics to track things like how long it takes us to respond to support queries. Using this data we can look into how we’re currently performing and whether there’s room for improvement.

Status page

Another to-do list item is to build out a status page with Crisp. With a status page, we can give a clear and simple picture of the health of our infrastructure. It’s a helpful place we can send our clients if we’re having downtime so they can get the most up-to-date information about how we’re progressing towards a solution. A Crisp status page is hosted externally which has the added benefit of being available even if our own servers are down.

In conclusion, we’re impressed by Crisp and how it’s been helping us keep our support service on track for the last few months. We’d recommend it as a messaging platform and look forward to getting even more out of it as time goes by.