Spikeball is a Help Scout User for Life: Here's Why
“We love Help Scout. As the customer support department head, I get many sales calls from other help desks. It is always an easy ‘no’ since we have been so happy with Help Scout.”
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Challenge: Spikeball previously relied on Zendesk as its customer communications platform, but the company soon realized that its clunky interface, confusing features, and limited organizational capabilities made it difficult for the team to do its day-to-day work.
Solution: The switch to Help Scout has provided the Spikeball team with a support solution that is easy to use and has increased efficiency without compromising the quality of customer care.
Spikeball completely changed the outdoor sports industry by creating a new game and fostering a community of players that would start a global movement. Spikeball tournaments are hosted worldwide and even televised on sporting channels like ESPN. We spoke with Hadas Look, Director of Supply Chain Integrity at Spikeball, who shared how Help Scout makes it easier to organize requests, respond to more emails, increase efficiency, and easily work cross-functionally.
The challenge: Zendesk was limiting the support team
Hadas explained that the team had previously relied on Zendesk to manage customer communications, but it presented several significant challenges for the team.
[Zendesk] was clunky, had tons and tons of unneeded or confusing features, and did not allow for the same level of organization we have now. And the cost was astronomical.
The solution: Switching to Help Scout
Hadas shared that, when the team evaluated different software solutions, the user experience and organizational capabilities were some of the main reasons they decided to purchase Help Scout.
We loved the modern approach and interface the most. It’s intuitive and easy for new users to learn. It also allows us to structure mailboxes in a way that makes sense.
The result: Improved collaboration, increased efficiency, and fewer hours spent on new employee training
Ease of use boosts efficiency and saves valuable time
Zendesk was making it hard for Hadas and her team to do their job. The complicated and confusing features created roadblocks, and the complex platform made for a steep learning curve. The switch to Help Scout’s intuitive platform has made day-to-day work and onboarding easier and more efficient. Now, Hadas spends fewer hours training employees on how to operate software and more time teaching critical business processes.
Help Scout makes my life infinitely easier. The ease of use for reports makes me a Help Scout devotee for life. We’ve been able to support more customers over time using Help Scout. We see an average of 30% growth year over year in tickets replied, and we have kept our response time consistent. Additionally, since the user interface is so intuitive, it has saved me hours that would have otherwise been spent on training new employees.
Improved mailbox organization allows for cross-functional collaboration
Help Scout’s mailboxes are as easy to use as regular email, with the added benefits of organization, automation, and collaboration features that teams need to be successful.
For Spikeball, the platform has enabled several significant changes that are helping the company better serve customers. For instance, the company has now created a system where conversations are sorted into mailboxes by request type, so the appropriate team can promptly answer customer requests. Additionally, various teams now have visibility into the support queue and can collaborate directly in customer conversations with features like notes. Hadas shared how Spikeball has structured mailboxes and details for the different departments that work in Help Scout:
Having multiple mailboxes allows us to organize the different types of requests coming in. Tickets can be sorted based on their topic. For example, any wholesale request is sorted into our Wholesale inbox. General Support reps know that if they see a wholesale-related request, they should move that conversation into the Wholesale inbox, where our Wholesale Ops team can take care of the request. Similarly, we have a Finance inbox. Our finance team utilizes Help Scout and has enjoyed being able to collaborate by adding notes to conversations.
Workflows 🤝 Tags
Automating tedious and repetitive tasks and using if/then logic to assign tags to conversations are two of the many benefits of creating workflows.
Hadas told us that the Spikeball team uses workflows and tags to automatically categorize conversations as they come in, allowing the team to answer and assign questions more quickly.
We have several workflows that automatically add tags to conversations, which is a big time saver. Depending on the email's subject line, specific tags may be added.
But the power of workflows and tags doesn’t stop here. Not only is this functionality helpful for the support team to work efficiently, but it also provides business insights. Hadas shared more about how workflows and tags help determine where marketing resources should be used:
We also use workflows to tag conversations with the country that the conversation originates from. This helps our international team understand where many of our high-touch customers come from and helps inform where we should allocate marketing resources.
Beacon + Docs make for proactive support
Help Scout’s support widget, Beacon, has also helped Spikeball better serve customers. Beacon makes it possible to surface relevant Docs articles and offer live chat on specific web pages, which allows for self-service. The tool makes it easy for customers to find the answers they need quickly and means one less chat for the team to respond to. Hadas shared with us how Spikeball uses Beacon to provide proactive support and increase her team’s productivity:
We like having the ability to turn on live chat via Beacon. It has helped us answer real-time questions from customers who are shopping on the website. It also enables us to make the most common help articles incredibly easy to access.
We especially like to have our Holiday Shipping Guidelines article in Beacon during the holiday season. This saves us time because customers can self-serve and have their questions answered without relying on a support rep to email them back.
Powerful automations and an intuitive platform make Spikeball a Help Scout user for life
Help Scout is a critical tool for Spikeball, helping the company seamlessly serve customers and shoppers and enabling customer support teams to provide quality care while staying productive.
The ease of accessing reports, organizing mailboxes, and creating Beacons are just a few reasons why Spikeball is a Help Scout user for life.
We love Help Scout. As the customer support department head, I get many sales calls from other help desks. It is always an easy ‘no’ since we have been so happy with Help Scout.
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Megan Kopalasingam
The Supportive Weekly: A newsletter for people who want to deliver exceptional customer service.