This is part of a new series written by our Customer Operations Lead Connor McGee. Part 1 “The Value of Customer Operations” can be found here.
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At CareerJSM we value effective Customer Operations. To power our customer operations department we rely on a number of integrations and software tools to quickly and efficiently work across our entire team.
We thought we would take some time to share our customer operations tech stack, as well as some internal processes we have set up with our customers. We hope that this shares a bit of information on our company, and that other startups out there can learn from how we run our operations.
Let’s get into the tools our Customer Operations department uses on a daily basis, and how our business leverages them to help our customers.
Providing support for customers is central to running any customer facing team. For this, CareerJSM strongly recommends using Freshdesk. Through Freshdesk we do live chat support, answer support tickets and provide solutions to FAQs.
Through these channels our team is able to help job seekers or career transition consultants through every step of using our platforms. To clearly illustrate value I’ll present two situations our team dealt with, and how we handled it.
These numbers represent a 90 day rolling average.
Example 1: A career transition consultant submits a ticket to our Freshdesk account that they’d like the ability to add notes to registration requests in the HUB – to inform administrators that a request has been reviewed for approval. This feature request is passed on to our development team who build the feature, test it, and add it to our next release. After the launch of this new feature our Customer Operations team informs our customers about it, and creates a newsletter to ensure that every administrator knows how to use it properly.
Example 2: A job seeker in our portal is looking for information about submitting their Record of Employment to the Canadian government while they are between careers. Right away one of our Customer Operations staff can direct them to the proper website, while also directing them towards related content available in our Learning Centre.
Interactions with customers are a central part to our feedback loop. Thanks to Freshdesk our Customer Operations team can provide meaningful, frequency based, insight to our development team. By doing this we are able to constantly improve our product in ways that best fit the needs of our customers.
Thanks to feedback from our customers we’ve added some great new features. For example, our customers told us that their coaching sessions could be improved if they could see what content their job seeker clients were engaging with in our JSM portal. As a result we added an oversight feature that allowed career transition coaches to see their clients resumes, jobs saved and even their progress through learning content.
We use Slack for our internal communications so the team can stay on top of the various projects we have going on at any given time. In short, it’s a team live chat program.
Why do you need this? Simple, it cuts down lag time between team communications.
For example, our Customer Operations Lead Connor is going into a meeting and won’t have access to our support channels. Thanks to Slack Connor can easily, and quickly, get a hold of another team member to watch our channels.
Slack is also compatible with a huge amount of integrations. Every time a support ticket has been submitted, or a bug has been found, our team gets a notification thanks to Slack’s integrations with Freshdesk, Bugsnag, Papertrail and NewRelic (to name a few). This means that our team can fix bugs before our customer even notices they’re there.
Through HubSpot our team builds email templates, tracks activity on our emails (opened, unopened, link clicks etc) and develops our business funnels. We also use it for live chat (between 9am-5pm) on this website as you’ll see at the bottom right of your browsing window!
Thanks to Hubspot’s operations management tools we’ve been able to streamline the user activation process for our customers. Our activation rate is an industry leading 82%, 30% above industry average, which represents huge growth in realized revenue for our clients.
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Interested in joining our Customer Operations team? We’re hiring a Sales and Operations Intern for Summer 2018! More information on this opening is available on our AngelList page here.