Workflows: Customer Support Email Forms Save Time Up Front

If you have read any of our “Apps We Love” series, you know there are lots of apps which enhance your TextExpander experience, and lots of apps which provide a productivity boost on their own. We use many of these apps ourselves, and combine them where we can to create workflows.

We have many workflows in place, and today we are going to talk about the one we use to run our customer support forms via Wufoo, Zapier, and Desk.

Why an email form?

At first, we posted our email address in our apps and on our website so that customers could get in touch with us. Making it easy for customers to talk to you is a good thing, after all.

The downside: the majority of exchanges would start with us not answering their question but asking for some basic information:
– what app are you using
– what version
– what device are you using
– what operating system version

We create multiple apps, each on multiple platforms, so this is important information. After all, Windows 8.1 has different quirks than iOS 10.

This information is automatically sent to us if a customer emails us from within one of our apps, but what about when they don’t email us from there?

Self-service centers are a fast way to find answers and are growing in popularity. Many people email us from our website or after searching the web for the answer.

Did You Know: we have a knowledge base here.

So, we decided to have a web form which would prompt people to include this necessary information upfront. This saves us, and each customer, time spent on the initial back-and-forth.

We did this by hooking up three apps together. Wufoo, which allows you to create web forms, Desk, our support center through which our multi-person team can reply to multiple emails, and Zapier, similar to If This Then That it hooks these apps together.

Why use Wufoo over the Desk form

Wufoo’s forms better fit what we needed. It allows a bit of macro magic in Rules and offers custom fields to appear in the form based on how a previous field is filled out.

How It Works

When a customer fills out the form, they are prompted to fill in just the information we need based on their selections in the form. That data is sent to Desk along with the email message through the magic of Zapier.

Desk allows for multiple Rules. We set up several rules to take the information transmitted through Zapier and turn that into tags, aka Desk labels, in each email case, as well as pre-populate more information into the cases’ descriptions.

The Desk label lets us know to assign the case to the TextExpander team. We do have other apps 🙂 and they get their own labels.

Once in a specific email case, we can immediately see in the case description that this customer is using, say, TextExpander v1.4 on a Windows PC running 7.1. This means when we ask a customer to, for example, go find a specific file, we’ll know not to send the macOS directions 🙂

This is just one of the workflows we have in place to help our support team run.

What workflows and apps are you using to make yourself and your team more efficient? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter.