Too Many Tickets to Handle with One Team
SketchUp, a subsidiary of Trimble, helps its customers bring their ideas to life with intuitive 3D modeling software. Their robust toolset is used by over 30 million people for everything from architectural models to video game design.
As you might imagine, with a userbase that large the SketchUp team handles a high volume of customer service tickets. Processing these tickets is a large undertaking and an important priority for the organization. Before TextExpander, the small support team at SketchUp tried managing the volume of tickets coming in through online forums. This approach, however, left them sharing answers to personalized problems in a one-to-many format, which rarely proved to be efficient from their customer service perspective.
SketchUp’s technical support manager, Ty Schalamon, describes why this mass-communicated customer support was not ideal for SketchUp:
The forum-based solution for handling related questions relied heavily on the customer to search for answers online. Even then, when questions reached the customer service team at SketchUp, instead of just answering the questions the team was spending time referring customers to the forum where an answer existed.
The approach was impersonal and inefficient—and often left customers doing the bulk of the work.
Moving to a Lean, Efficient Support Team
Because customer satisfaction was a No. 1 priority, SketchUp began looking for a way to streamline their customer support operations.
The solution was TextExpander, a software tool that allows users to easily insert text snippets in any application from a library of custom content shared across their team. The technology and the efficiencies it created were important in helping SketchUp move to a forum-free support approach.
In 2015, Schalamon was selected to lead the support team, and it didn’t take long for them to introduce him to TextExpander:
Although Schalamon had spent the previous decade in customer support roles, he was surprised by what he saw:
TextExpander was actually the second thing I learned about, after how to use the espresso machine. It was kind of a mind-blowing moment of, ‘Where has this been and why have I not had this for the last ten years?
Because customer satisfaction was a No. 1 priority, SketchUp began looking for a way to streamline their customer support operations.
The solution was TextExpander, a software tool that allows users to easily insert text snippets in any application from a library of custom content shared across their team. The technology and the efficiencies it created were important in helping SketchUp move to a forum-free support approach.
In 2015, Schalamon was selected to lead the support team, and it didn’t take long for them to introduce him to TextExpander.
Although Schalamon had spent the previous decade in customer support roles, he was surprised by what he saw:
TextExpander was actually the second thing I learned about, after how to use the espresso machine. It was kind of a mind-blowing moment of, ‘Where has this been and why have I not had this for the last ten years?’
Schalamon explained that in the past he, like the support team at SketchUp, had to search his email archives for answers to questions he had already addressed. But with TextExpander he could catalog that information for easy retrieval, which is especially advantageous for commonly asked questions.
TextExpander drastically improved efficiency of the SketchUp support team, saving them approximately:
22.5
Hours
8
Employees
12
Months
2,160
Total Hours
Saved Annually
270
Work Days
While Schalamon was impressed with TextExpander initially, it wasn’t until he saw what it did that he understood the value it brought to SketchUp:
TextExpander allows us to quickly and consistently answer questions with fewer resources than before. It’s a powerful tool.
Right now, the average time savings across our support team for typing alone is approximately 20–25 hours a month per person. When you multiply the time savings by the eight people on my team, that’s immediately one additional person that we don’t have to hire.
But typing isn’t the only way that TextExpander helps Schalamon’s team save time:
It eliminates all of the guesswork and the back and forth of finding and confirming answers. SketchUp’s prior solution didn’t share information, which added time to tickets. Now we always have an answer waiting and we’re able to present a consistent voice for every inquiry. As a result, our customers are happier because we’re not asking them to search through the existing Q&A in a forum.
Enabling Better Customer Support
With such a large impact on saving time and its associated costs, it’s no surprise that TextExpander is an essential component of SketchUp’s customer support tech stack. “It’s so ingrained into our culture here that I almost forget how to type without it,” said Schalamon.
The support team uses TextExpander alongside other mission-critical tools, such as their customer relationship management (CRM) system, to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible.
By combining email templates from their CRM with more flexible and searchable TextExpander snippets, the support team can respond to email enquiries quickly, composing custom answers from a shared repository.
As Schalamon explains, because his team relies on those snippets to collect answers to support inquiries, TextExpander also serves as a central knowledge base for the entire SketchUp team:
When we have a new issue come up, we’re able to create a snippet and quickly share it so that everybody has the solution and our customers get a consistent response. Our team doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time a question arises like we did before—that knowledge is already there in TextExpander.
He credits his team’s speed and consistency for the success that SketchUp’s customer support has achieved:
Our Net Promotor Score® is above the industry average and I definitely think TextExpander is a contributing factor to that. It allows us to present a consistent message and exceed expectations with how quickly we’re answering customer questions.
What’s best is we are able to maintain a personal tone—agents have the ability to create their own snippets or use existing ones to fill in the technical details of an answer.
In addition to helping SketchUp offer a better experience to its customers, Schalamon also described how TextExpander enables the team to get new employees up to speed more quickly and easily:
We’re now more organized, so it’s a lot easier for someone new to jump right in. We hired someone a few weeks ago and they’re already answering tickets because that knowledgebase is there. With TextExpander, they can find an issue and answer that ticket without having to consult with anyone.
Sharing the Success
SketchUp doesn’t only use TextExpander within its support team. Across the company, from marketing to HR and development to sales, SketchUp departments are finding ways to utilize TextExpander to make their work easier and more efficient.
Schalamon shared that the impact goes beyond SketchUp:
I’ve actually made a guide to teach my colleagues at Trimble, our parent company, how to use it. I recently attended a conference with all the other support managers from Trimble. We shared our best practices and we used a lot of that time to talk about TextExpander. Since then, other teams have realized the value of TextExpander and started using it worldwide.
Conclusion
Using TextExpander to store and share information, and to respond quickly and efficiently with answers to support enquiries, has allowed SketchUp to replace an inefficient process with a small, effective team. Their customers reap the rewards of this change through a fast, consistent support experience that makes SketchUp’s great product even better.
Ty Schalamon, Technical Support Manager SketchUp
We just love TextExpander.