Change is never easy. Sudden change can be even rougher. The sudden shift to remote work has been a challenge for many organizations as they seek out ways to keep their operations running smoothly and their customers feeling supported.
For customer service departments, this means being able to keep picking up calls and providing support with the same consistency and quality remotely as they do in the office.
In hopes of getting a sense of how this transition is going, we caught up with Utah-based enterprise project management tools provider Workfront and asked them how they are shifting their team’s culture and utilizing technology in the face of the changes.
Why Workfront Chose Talkdesk
Serving over 3,000 customers worldwide, Workfront’s software helps enterprises manage resources and track tasks throughout large organizations. Their global support team is spread out between Utah, London, Armenia, and more locations, providing 24/7 service to their customers.
Underpinning Workfront’s support operations is Talkdesk, the California-based Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) technology provider. Workfront has been using Talkdesk for nearly three years now says Nic Bryson, Workfront’s VP of Customer Enablement and Support, who leads their global support team.
Having worked with Talkdesk at his previous company, Bryson brought the CCaaS on to replace what he described as a more costly and less effective system.
“When I came to Workfront they had already bought another tool that I found came with too many strings attached,” he says. “They required us to buy extra equipment and pay more for basic integrations like we needed for Salesforce, all of which they failed to mention in the sales process. We got through it all, turned it on, and then found ourselves dealing with terrible latency issues. Moreover, in many instances, customers had real difficulty hearing us on the line. It just failed at every turn.”
“So I found myself in the same exact situation as before when I had chosen to work with Talkdesk at my last company,” says Bryson, explaining that, “I told them that we could be up and running in a week so we got a trial spun up."
"I was actually over at our office in Armenia at the time. I was able to get a crystal clear call up and running from my less-than-stellar hotel WiFi back to our office in Utah”
Favorite Features
Bryson and his Director of Customer Support, Greg Ballard, cite a number of features that have helped them to gain better visibility over their operations and assist in planning.
Ballard points to analytics like the heatmap that helps them track when they receive the most contacts from customers. “It helps us plan staffing for heavier or lighter, as well as more basic things like when to schedule lunch or meetings,” he says. “It’s not just the real-time reporting but the trends as well. We’ve been able to make much smarter decisions, seeing data on things like which days of the week we get the most contacts.”
While he says that it varies by team, they found that as a B2B company, they got the most tickets at the beginning and end of the day, with Thursday taking the cake.
Integrations with Salesforce and other popular business software is a significant plus they explain, but a key feature is the ease with which their team members can jump into the system and make changes on the fly if necessary. All without needing help from their systems operations team.