Overview

There are a lot of customers who purchase Drift for Sales and Marketing but want to bring in their Support team so they are all on one platform. It’s important to know what the tech stack looks like so you can fully understand what goes into supporting customers via chat. Typically speaking a customer support organization will have the following:

 

• Ticketing platform (tool to respond to customers and track cases)
• Knowledge base (a repository of help content for their product)
• Chat platform (tool for supporting their customers)

 

Depending on what is being used, Drift integrates directly with Zendesk for ticketing or email forwarding can be used to submit the ticket. This works for platforms like Salesforce, Jira, Freshdesk, Intercom and others. Help Article reference

 

For the knowledge base Drift support HelpDocs, HelpScout, Wordpress and Zendesk. This enables the use of the help article loook up skill to search the knowledge base for help articles in the bot flow. Help Article reference.

User Personas

• Administrator - building playbooks for support
• Manager - reporting metrics on playbook performance, reporting on teammate performance, reporting on chat volume
• End User - chatting with customers using Desktop or browser Conversation View

Admin Details

The admin or operations person would typically be in charge of creating/designing the playbooks. They are typically interested in ensuring the playbooks will deflect cases from their team (help article lookup), allow customers to submit a ticket (ticket creation skill) and is setup for both an online and offline experience (chat with a resource or submit a ticket)

Manager Details

The manager is most interested in the reporting to understand performance of both the playbooks and the team. Playbook reporting can indicate where chats are coming from (URL), what topics are being asked (tagging by the agent or via button responses) and overall volume (chat reports). Team performance should focus on the response time, CSAT and chat length (resolution time).

End User Details

The users in chat will be the support reps in Drift. They would want to understand how to request a CSAT, how to tag conversations, how to invite others in and schedule meetings, and how to use Saved Replies. It is important to note on Saved Replies you can’t edit the order so best practice for now would be to include some labeling system to identify the types of replies. Example: BIL - cancel, BIL - renewal date, where BIL stands for Billing. Drift Video is useful for support to share answers/solutions with customers while in chat or their ticketing system. If in chat, best practice is to let the customer know you will be recording a video so they know why you aren’t responding while you get them the answer.

Best Practices

When thinking about Drift for Support there are some key things that will help make you successful. Having your team setup for success can help reduce your ticket volume or chat resolution time which ultimately leads to cost savings for your team.

Things to consider

• Setting up Saved Replies
• Linking to a knowledge base
• Building your playbooks to deflect cases
• Having a feedback loop to make changes
• Reviewing your team performance
• Measuring customer satisfaction

Setting up Saved Replies

Saved replies are critical to your support team so they aren't re-typing the same answers over and over. These are typically things like password resets, billing FAQ links or basic troubleshooting questions (think instructions to clear cache in Google).

If you are moving over from another platform, we recommend finding the current saved replies in your system to migrate them over. These could be called Macros if you're using a ticketing system.

Example in Zendesk:

1. Navigate to Settings> Under Manage click Macros
2. Find the ones related to support that you want to copy over to Drift
3. Copy the message your team would send and create new Saved Replies in Drift

Linking to a Knowledge Base

The knowledge base is your customer repository for how to solve their problems. Linking Drift to your knowledge base allows your customers to ask your bot questions and search through your knowledge base for the answer.

Building Your Playbooks to Deflect Cases

Support playbooks should be designed to answer your customer questions and get them the solution to their issues. If you have common questions you can use keywords or button responses to drive customers to the answers.

Having a Feedback Loop to Make Changes

Once you've implemented your playbooks you need to make sure you are reviewing the results. There are several reports you should look at when understanding performance of your playbooks: Chat Conversations and Playbook Flow.

Chat Conversations will provide insight into the total conversations you have day over day and where your site visitors are coming from. You should use this to see if your playbook design is positively impacting your chat volume for live support (in this case less conversations with agents and more with bots would be a positive impact).

You are also able to see where your conversations are coming from to help track down what areas of your site (or web based platform) your customer questions are coming from. This can point you to where you need to focus your efforts into making changes (adding FAQs, adding help doc links in-app, providing feedback to your product/website team to make changes to make things easier, etc.)

Playbook Flow will tell you where to make changes in the playbook design to deflect the maximum number of cases so your customers can self serve and get help faster. If you notice people are choosing specific options more frequently you can focus there for updates/changes. If you notice drop offs in places you can see if the bot flow answered their question.

 

Reviewing Your Team Performance

Focusing on the bot performance is half of the process. The other is when the customer gets to your support team and being able to measure their performance. The two reports here are Overview and Missed Conversations.

Overview will give you details into your team performance based on response time, CSAT and volume so you can track performance and find areas to coach.

Missed Conversations will let you see the breakdown of conversations missed by your teammates so you can find ways for them to improve. A missed conversation is one where the resource was routed in but did not respond in time.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is important to know if your team is providing a high quality customer experience. At Drift you have two ways to ask your customers for a satisfaction rating from a chat: manually or automatically.

Manually an agent can type in /rating to request a conversation rating for that chat interaction.

If you prefer Automatic CSAT so every chat gets a request for a rating and none slip through the cracks you can enable that per team.

For more details you can check out this help article here.