By Sterling Anderson, Director of Customer Support & Insights
SEDNA is a shared inbox solution used to streamline communication within teams. Our ethos is “Save Time. Work Together”. With any business-critical application, being able to use the system is well, critical. To ensure our customers get the most out of SEDNA, we have a global customer support team available 24/7.
My name is Sterling Anderson, and I head up the customer support team at SEDNA. I’ve been involved in the customer experience industry for over 15 years and I am equally passionate about our customers as well as building teams.
Our support team is located around the world and we fundamentally believe in a work-from-anywhere philosophy. We provide coverage from SEDNA’s three main locations – London, Singapore, and Vancouver.
Current State of Customer Support
Accessing support within SEDNA
As of today, customers can contact the customer support team via email, the SEDNA Help Centre, and through SEDNA itself. We know that communication is key to the success of any business. With this in mind, we strive to deliver a world-class experience to our customers, so they can focus on what matters to them the most.
For 2019, January through October, the SEDNA Customer Support team had a median First Reply Time (FRT) of 20 minutes. FRT is the time it takes for a support agent to reply to the initial request to the customer. Essentially, it’s how fast we are able to do an initial assessment of the reported issue and follow up with an update or request more information. In a recent Zendesk benchmark analysis, they reported that the technology sector has an average First Reply Time of 2 hours.
Our 20-minute FRT is industry-leading.
Within those 20-minutes we conduct an initial assessment. If the report is in relation to any potential downtime or critical issues within the platform, such as the inability to send or receive mail or access the platform, we immediately update the SEDNA Status Page. The SEDNA Status Page allows us to quickly communicate any widespread issues to all of our customers, regardless of the status of SEDNA. Customers are also able to subscribe to the page to be notified of any updates.
We also have a knowledge base, the SEDNA Help Centre, which houses around 100 articles providing customers with step by step instructions, supported by gifs and screenshots, on how to use the different features of SEDNA. We continue to add articles as we release new features. This is a great resource for teams and can be quickly accessed by searching keywords in the SEDNA dashboard.
Searching in the SEDNA Help Center
Looking Towards the Future – Launching Live Chat
Going back to FRT, we know that 20-minutes is fast, world-class fast. That being said, in the world of business transactions, a lot can happen in 20-minutes. This is why we are excited to announce that we are bringing Live Chat to SEDNA Customer Support in 2020.
Live Chat will allow us to help our customers in real-time to address their key concerns and issues. Live Chat is fast, reliable, and gives users and support agents a channel where they can share key information without having to worry about timezones, accents, or spelling mistakes.
Live Chat Inc shares in a 2018 customer service report that the average FRT is 48 seconds. Forty. Eight. Seconds. That is crazy fast. That being said, replying quickly is half the battle. At SEDNA we want to be fast, but more importantly, we want to be able to resolve the customers’ issues. There are certain caveats to using live chat, and it will not be able to resolve all issues immediately. For some concerns, we will still need to collect information for further testing and pass on to our Development Team. However, live chat is still a great tool to help us gain insight into issues and collect information, such as screenshots, logs, etc.
In addition to Live Chat, the vision for SEDNA Customer Support is to further embrace an Omnichannel culture. Omnichannel is described by Freshdesk as “connect(ing) the experiences across the channels by making the customer experience completely seamless.” We want to meet customers where they are, so we are also looking at expanding into other channels such as WhatsApp and WeChat to further diversify the support experience across SEDNA, while maintaining the same high caliber of service.
“We get good feedback, and we get great answers about features from your support team.”
Why We Don’t Offer Phone Support
You might have noticed that telephone support is not one of the channels we’re looking to implement. Why? Because we cannot give customers the same level of service over the phone. Many of the issues that we deal with involve email addresses, message IDs, URLs and other complex information that is extremely difficult to share over the phone.
We love our customers and want to help them get the most out of SEDNA. The best way to get 24/7 help is via email and soon Live Chat. By being ever-present online, we have the ability to receive information from customers, look into our systems, speak with our colleagues, conduct testing, and get to the bottom of the issue without awkward silences or putting customers on hold.
If you have any questions about the Customer Support team, how we work, how we can help you, or if you are interested in learning more about our upcoming Live Chat feature, please reach out to me, Sterling Anderson, at [email protected]. I hope to hear from you!
About Sterling
Sterling is the Director of Customer Support & Insights at SEDNA, dad-joke aficionado, and Edmonton Oilers super fan. He works out of our Vancouver Office.