Three years back, Jack Dorsey drew a prototype for short communication service in his flip-pad when he was working for Odeo, a podcasting company. I don’t think he would have realized it then that this going to be a rage in 2009. Not even when Biz Stone and Evan Williams joined him to start a company in 2006. Not even when Biz made his first Tweet…


Twitter, officially called as a micro-blogging service, is a social media platform where people communicate with each other in 140 characters. If you think what 140 characters can do, it helped a guy to win an election, it’s being used to teach students in universities,it gathered a whole nation for a protest, some one used it to report live from Mars and a country tracked their worst terrorist attack in it. Twitter has officially become the most popular communication platform beating out email and SMS…

So what? Why Twitter in a customer support software?

Twitter has become a way of expression. It is the best place to show that you are happy or sad to all of your friends through a single click. So if a person is not happy about the product he recently bought, in good old days he would have told his close friends and the time for the bad news to travel is more. Now, he goes and makes a simple update in Twitter – Result: The news travels faster than light. And believe me, if his update is funny, there will numerous retweets (an option to repeat the message of another person) and if the person is celebrity, you can pack your bags.
Dell, Comcast, Starbucks have wonderful twitter strategies in the recent times. There are dedicated support staffs in Comcast to track the customer tweets (whether it’s good or bad) and try to solve their problem if they have any. Other brands using Twitter to get close customers are Jet Blue, The Home Depot, Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, Popeyes and the list is growing. Salesforce, Parature and many On-Demand service providers have embraced Twitter as another communication channel.

How does SupportCenter Plus integrates Twitter?

As you know SupportCenter Plus is a web based customer support product and it provides the leverage to integrate Twitter in a wonderful way. SupportCenter Plus will allow you to search 5 different search tags in Twitter. When you want a particular tweet to be made as a ticket, it can be selected and made as a ticket. The reply to the ticket can be done as a Tweet back to the customer.

Twitter Updates


What if I want to send him a Private Message?

If you want the customer’s number or contact details, you can also use the Direct Message feature of Twitter to send a private message to the customer. 


What do I need?

A twitter Handle – Go to www.twitter.com, create an account for yourself or your company, start Tweeting and I bet you will be amazed at the amount of conversations happening about your brand or industry. If you already have one, go to the Admin page in SupportCenter Plus and configure…

So what are you waiting for, Support your customers in 140 characters or less and enjoy the chirpy Tweet bird’s magic

PS: 1.Twitter Integration is available from the latest build of SupportCenter Plus. Go to www.supportcenterplus.com to download.

2. A funny video to end.. A couple updating Twitter immediately after their marriage. If you think people are crazy, believe me your customers will also be crazy about Twitter. We too are crazy about this new feature... How about you?







 

 

With SupportCenter Plus 7.5 Professional Edition, the support server can now offer Multi-Tenancy through Business Units. This means that multiple SupportCenter Plus installations can be combined into one install, with one central configuration database managing input requests to multiple group data files. The result is lower total cost of ownership for customers requiring a central customer support system environment since we are able manage Customer HelpDesk installs on fewer servers. Response times for single server multi-tenant customer support management are comparable to a single-tenant install.

Multi Tenancy

Multi-Tenancy can be used for companies with separate brands or divisions. Example: a automobile company has two divisions, one that sells motor cycles and another cars. In this model, multi-tenancy would enable the company to have one SupportCenter installation, while each division has a separate database and customization of the application.

CRM Multi Tenancy


Each Business Unit may be defined the following way:

Group of companies belonging to same verticle, companies in same geographies, companies dealing with same products, etc...Hence the business units can be defined based on your company's needs...

Help Desk Software with Multi Tenancy


Value offered through Business Units for Customer Support Management:

  • Business Units provides you the flexibility in servicing your customers based on different criteria like products, SBUs, Products, Customer Accounts, regions, countries, sites etc.
  • It offers you logical separation of data as one business unit is independent of the other.
  • Improves support productivity as the consolidating customer information into a single location with easy-to-use reporting, visualization and customer management capabilities.
  • The segregation of data helps you to manage the customers accordingly and helps you to identify right areas to improve the customer support and service.
  • It gives you the power of customization. Customize your support process in your own way.

Happy Customer Support,
Team SupportCenter Plus

Today’s customer support environment puts your company under greater pressure to reduce operational costs and offer business value by your support, your support process needs a service level management and automation of your SLA rules that can:

  • Shrink the cost of support delivered
  • Meet the growing need for business ready support
  • Improve support quality and your ability to meet service level requirements
  • Ensure the value of support investments are realized

SupportCenter Plus meets these objective at ease:

Earlier on crossing the SLA defined only a mail can be triggered to the respective manager, now the automation starts at marking the trouble tickets as L1, L2 and L3 and directing to groups as G1, G2, G3 and switches of levels and groups based on escalation criteria.

Organize SLA actions

The benefit of our First Response SLA is to capture the unnoticed tickets which is the first level of escalation for immediate attention. You can configure upto to four levels of escalations where actions automatically get attached to Support Representatives.


SLA Escalation

SupportCenter Plus gives flexibility and automation of escalation to different levels of tickets or support representatives. This improves the efficiency of your support process by 15%

Also get e-mails triggered on the status of your trouble tickets.

SLA header 












To counteract a significant waste of existing support resources as manual methods of SLA administration are employed SupportCenter Plus SLA actions automate SLA activities. Most important among these  are real-time and over-time monitoring and predictive early warning to impending SLA breaches, and the ability to integrate support process and business needs of your customer.


Will walk you through more benefits of SupportCenter Plus 7.5 benefits in the upcoming blogs

Happy Customer Support,

Team SupportCenter Plus 

TMCnet talks about SupportCenter Plus

Sep 24 2009 02:58:51 AM Posted By : nandini

TMCnet identified the release of SupportCenter Plus' latest version. Now, TMCnet, talks about SupportCenter Plus' salient making...

David Sims - a contributing editor for TMCnet has written an article about SupportCenter Plus. In his article titled ''Call Center Software", David talks aboutSupportCenter Plus 7.5 and its potential contribution to the industry...

Below are few excerpts form David's article:



 the product can now meet the needs of larger organizations, company officials say the multi-tenancy capability means users can "simultaneously assist internal users from various company departments and business units, as well as help individual customers and customer groups" from a single console.


Its Computer Telephony Integration feature is designed to speed up the time to resolution, company officials say -- "with CTI, when a user makes a phone call for assistance, SupportCenter Plus can match the number from which the user is calling with information about the user's computer configuration stored in a database." At that point the product can route the call to a specific technician.
 
Full article can be viewed here

Happy Reading!

Team SupportCenter Plus 

Discussion Forums for Customer Support

Sep 08 2009 04:06:54 AM Posted By : nandini

 Dear Readers,

 I am happy to share with you the two new initiatives to offer all Customer Support Management Professionals couple of web platforms to share  their knowledge:

One is on Twitter: http://twitter.com/supportrep

The other is: Customer Support Management Forum on LinkedIn

Looking forward to your active participation.


Wishing you Simple, Flexible and Lively Customer Support,

Team - SupportCenter Plus

Support Like Never Before...

Aug 07 2009 07:54:27 AM Posted By : sylvian

I never wanted to write the clichéd quote on change again “Change is the only constant” but somehow I didn’t get a better one for this post. The makeover mania is all over the world. Yahoo got one, Google Chrome got themes and even Susan Boyle (Britain’s Got Talent Finalist) got one too.. 


Yes SupportCenter Plus has got the much needed make over… SupportCenter Plus 7.5 has been released and the make over is not only about the brand new refreshing UI but with the features too…The new version of SupportCenter Plus will make your customer support simple, flexible and lively.

Come on what’s so new, it looks the same?

Hmmm, I can’t give you detailed list of features and enhancements here. But in short these are the features of SupportCenter Plus 7.5

  • Multi-tenancy through Business Units
  • Remote Assistance (Integration with Zoho Meeting)
  • Computer Telephony Integration (CTI with Asterisk)
  • Secured email fetching & sending
  • Customer Portal Enhancements
  • Request Module Enhancements
  • Brand New User Interface

Know more about the new features from here and if you want the complete list of features in SupportCenterplus 7.5, check it out here. We have provided a complete version for a trial download so that you can try our new features.Give it a try and we are looking forward to your feedback... 

Support your customers like never before....

You are welcome to evaluate us!!

May 18 2009 05:03:45 PM Posted By : nandini

Its undoubtedly challenging to select the right vendor for any software needed at work and its no different task in selecting a customer support software.

Its a daunting chore to get the checklist ready to evaluate different software in the market. Its good to have it readymade, any "Nos"?

Here you go, we SupportCenter Plus offer you an exhaustive list of important features to look at while selecting a customer support software...when the checklist is ready all you have to do is to just cross-verify if the parameters are present in your short-listed products.

SupportCenterPlus Evaluation Guide

Download Guide

Impress your manager with quick analysis and suggestion.

Happy Support!

Team SupportCenter Plus

Calling 26444444….(Local Yellowpages)

Tring… Tring..Tring..

Hi Mr.Sylvian, What can I do for you?

Boom…I was surprised to hear my name on the other side and literally forgot what I was looking for. And then I came back to my feet and asked for the local pizza delivery number. It was a wonderful experience and gave a positive impact on the Yellow Pages service.

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) plays a very important role in supporting your customers. It is defined as the technology of linking of computers and telecom equipment to answer calls, to pull out information from the database based on the phone numbers and even route calls to different people in some cases.

A study by AT&T says that 27% of the customers, who don’t get an answer from the toll free number buy elsewhere or drop the idea of buying the service. It’s better to have computer telephony in such cases. Computer Telephony gives a profound positive effect on the customers and also gives a ‘wow’ experience to the customers. In the modern day business, you are not required to satisfy your customers, but you are required ‘wow’ them every time.

The major applications that a CTI can provide you is
1.    Call Answering
2.    Call Routing
3.    Pulling out customer data from the Data Base
4.    Interactive Voice Response ( IVR)

Think about this scenario, you are in customer support and you have an annoyed customer, who has mailed you 5 or 6 times that day. He is now calling you on the phone; you pick up and answer him with utmost sincerity, giving out his latest problems and possible solutions. I assure you, you are going to win him forever.

Now for the interesting part, in the next major release SupportCenter Plus 7.5, we are introducing CTI Integration. It will tightly integrate with the Accounts and Contact management module in order to give you data about the customer. We are starting up with Asterix PBX and Telephone Platform (Open Source) initially and will support Avaya, the market leader in Q2. Now that’s something interesting cooking up for you in the SupportCenter Plus kitchen.

A Change, Few Discussions & Merry Christmas

Dec 24 2008 01:14:27 AM Posted By : sylvian

The Change

As our ManageEngine Brand is leaping ahead in the IT Management space, the ManageEngine team has taken a decision to change their support email addresses in synchronization with the brand name. So now on the Support email address for SupportCenter Plus would be supportcenterplus-support@manageengine.com

The previous support email address support@supportcenterplus.com is still active and our support team will continue to serve the mails received in that mail address. But we request you to add our new mail address to your mail client to prevent the loss of emails (as our reply address would be the new mail address). We have received some complaints from customers on this issue and we apologize if any inconvenience caused by the email address change. Please support us in this change and help us to support you better.

The Discussions

We are preparing for a wonderful 2009 with new features, strong enhancements to the existing features and a lottttttttt ( I am not exaggerating ) of changes. We like your participation in this development process so that we can bring out features , which will help you to help your customers, better.

Join us for Forum Discussion on Time Sheet Module here and on Customer Portal Enhancement here.

And from SupportCenter Plus Team, We wish you Merry Christmas and Enjoy the fun filled holidays

Merry Christmas - SupportCenter Plus

Your Questions Answered...

Dec 11 2008 02:26:42 AM Posted By : sylvian

Questions are the life line of any support team. The more the questions asked, the better the customer support becomes. Our customer support has become better by your queries. We thank you for it.

In making it even better, we have tried to put a collection of frequently asked questions and answers about Supportcenter Plus. This will actually help people to install the product easily and troubleshoot some basic issues.

Here is the link

http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/support-center/faq.html

We would be happy to have your feedbacks on the same and mail your suggestions to supportcenterplus-support@manageengine.com