Customer Service with TextExpander

Productivity and Cost Effectiveness in Customer Service

WooThemes developed WooCommerce, used in almost 30% of eCommerce sites. Now they are part of Automattic, the makers of WordPress. In any organization, efficiency and cost effectiveness of staffing is important. WooThemes piloted measurable communication efficiencies in customer service that were easy to implement and scale across the organization. Staff members became more productive and able to respond both timely and consistently to customer needs.

Introduction

Keeping consistent and up-to-date outbound communication about products you sell gets more complex with every additional item. It’s also an increasing educational issue for every new staff member hired. WooThemes, developers of WooCommerce (and now part of Automattic), tackled this issue head-on with considerable success—success that you can apply within your own company. Learn how this team makes communication increasingly productive, more accurate, and fun!

Problem

WooThemes has hundreds of products with supporting information. How to share this quickly and accurately with every staff member so they can effectively communicate consistent and current information to their customers is a constant issue.

Solution

Finding snippets, pieces of information, and knowledge that you need to communicate to a customer is often handled through searching databases, libraries of documents, or email backlogs of prior communication. The information is there—somewhere. But finding it is hard when using systems not designed for retrieval where you need it.

Dedicated support systems can help, but they often capture information in yet another single-purpose database. Consequently, many companies like WooThemes use TextExpander. It’s designed for the information you communicate or send. Information can be personalized, or shared across a team, and accessed in just a few keystrokes.

It’s not tied to one app but works across all apps—email, support systems, messaging—so the same material can be sent easily from a single shared place.

WooThemes built a framework of shared TextExpander snippets to support growing demand. Over months, key team members contributed their most valuable snippets, advice, and workflows. The biggest benefit came to customers, the most important people of all.

They began with ~1,200 snippets, shared across the team, covering 300+ WooCommerce extensions and premium themes. After early success, training was created and usage expanded to the full support staff (25% of the company). This later scaled to other support groups at Automattic, managed by six snippet group administrators.

Business Benefits

WooCommerce, now part of Automattic with 400+ employees, powers over 30% of all eCommerce sites. The team optimized both accuracy and productivity in customer service by sharing snippets across teams.

Team consistency has benefitted from instant snippet synchronization, keeping everyone aligned with the most accurate text.

Other benefits included:

• Scalable monthly cost (charged only by usage).
• Management tools like admin, edit, and read-only permissions to protect sensitive snippets.
• Automatic updates across all platforms.

Summary

Tangible Benefits of TextExpander

• Increased customer service rep productivity
• Lower customer support costs
• Improved response accuracy and consistency → happier customers

Try a free trial of TextExpander for your business today. Whether it’s powering customer support, sales, or legal boilerplate, TextExpander saves time and money, increases accuracy and consistency, and reduces drudgery.