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The easiest way for designers to send email newsletters for themselves and their clients.

Tools we use: HelpSpot

Posted by Mathew Patterson on February 7, 2008 2:16 PM

One of the great advantages of producing software for web designers is that typically, our customers are pretty damn smart. That means they don't often need to ask us for help with using Campaign Monitor or MailBuild.

Sometimes things go wrong, or something's a bit unclear, or they just have an awesome idea for us, and people get in touch with us by email. Multiply that by all the thousands of customers around the world, and it adds up. To handle all that incoming mail, and the ongoing conversations, we use a great piece of software called HelpSpot from Userscape.

HelpSpot is essentially a web based issue tracking tool that fully integrates with your email. So when our customers email us, it pops up in our HelpSpot workspace and is immediately trackable, so nothing gets lost. As they come in the emails can be filtered, tags can be applied automatically, replies to existing issues are assigned to the right person and much more.

So our design and development team each have their own HelpSpot inbox, and issues are transferred to the person who can solve them as needed. If you've emailed support before, we can look up your previous issues and see what has happened, so we don't have to cover old ground.

For issues which pop up more often, we have a bunch of prepared response snippets we can insert and modify as required, which means a much faster and more detailed response. When we combine that capability with the reporting, we can easily see which parts of the application could use some improvements, and we know where to spend our time.

One recent improvement we've made uses HelpSpot as a form of monitoring tool. Even though we have all kinds of hardware and software monitoring in place for our applications and servers, some problems are spotted much faster by people than they are by any kind of system.

We've found in the past that our customers are pretty good at letting us know if something's gone wrong with a rush of support emails. However, sometimes it would happen overnight, and we wouldn't find out until other monitoring woke someone up.

Now we've harnessed HelpSpot so that it counts the number of requests coming in, and if it crosses certain thresholds triggers a system that will ring the phone of the person responsible for fixing it. Since it is web based, we can easily check it from home. (No, that is not a request to send 20 emails in a row to try and wake us up at night!).

There's lots more to HelpSpot, and it is a pretty key part of keeping everything running here at Freshview. We'd definitely recommend checking it out if you are finding a standard email client is not enough any more.

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