By Rachel Andrew CHAPTER 11about your product or needing support get a response, you demonstrate
that you are there to help. In addition, supporting people in such a visible
way promotes your product and can help to encourage a sense of com-
munity.
Several helpdesk products have some form of social media integration.
For example, Zendesk can turn a tweet into a support ticket, which can be
useful to monitor the track that a request has taken. We haven’t felt the
need to have such tight integration between our helpdesk and social media
activity, though many companies find this sort of integration helpful, in
particular when dealing with a lot of support that originates from a social
media channel.
37signals uses Twitter extensively when supporting its products, and
while its chosen helpdesk system has Twitter integration, the team found
it wasn’t working out for them:
Since we got serious about Twitter, we’ve mostly used the built in Twitter
functionality that our support tool (Desk.com) provides. When I asked the
team how it was working for them a couple months ago, the general reaction
was tepid. The consensus was that while it gets the job done, it was rather slow
to use, and the large number of retweets and links to SvN posts mixed in makes
it hard to get people with urgent questions answers promptly. Most of the team
was using it, but no one was happy about it.^14
— Noah Lorang, 37signalsThe series of posts about the Twitter tool used by 37signals is a fasci-
nating look at how a company can take a small part of their support opera-
tion and really tailor the experience for support staff and customers. It also
shows that even where you have selected a particular system for support,
if part of it doesn’t fit your needs you don’t need to completely change to a
different system. Instead, you can use an alternative approach in that area.
14 Noah Lorang, “Behind the Scenes: Twitter, Part 1”, http://smashed.by/scenes, 13 November 2012.