Road Testing the iPad – Part 2

March 30, 2012 by 3 Comments

What a great trip so far! WHD.global was a fantastic conference and we got to meet with a number of customers and partners. For the few days the conference was running, the city of Rust, Germany, became a small town full of true computer and hosting geeks. Definitely our type of people! Interestingly enough, a local Rust resident remarked that they would be glad when the conference was over so that they could get their WiFi back… That should be a good indication of how we took over the town!

As I’m still traveling through Europe, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to further evaluate the iPad as a replacement for a standard laptop computer and road testing its effectiveness in that capacity.

Observations on the iPad for Business

  • Right off the bat, I needed to use LogMeIn… into a 27-inch iMac with the incredible resolution of 2560×1440.
  • I can’t discuss the new iPad without mentioning the resolution and display. On a normal iPad, you need to zoom in and out constantly to work on documents, read websites, etc., but this is no longer necessary with the new high-resolution iPad display. Word documents, spreadsheets, image files and websites are all completely legible and unbelievably crisp and clear. I can honestly say there is a clear business benefit to the new iPad because of the improved resolution and display.
  • I have an Android phone and have constant issues with our standard Microsoft RAS VPN server. However, with the iPad and with the iPhones I’ve had, there is never an issue. I’m not sure how this continues to be a problem for Gingerbread devices, but it’s a shame.
  • Speaking of issues with Android and Microsoft compatibility, we use NT authentication to protect our development sites, internal reporting servers, etc. Working with this authentication schema is also a challenge for Gingerbread devices, although it seems that BETA versions of Firefox work around this on Android. By comparison, the standard Safari browser on iOS works flawlessly.
  • I did hit one snag working on the iPad. It’s not a hardware issue, but more of a software one. Many of our corporate documents are in Dropbox. Some of our Word and Excel documents are password protected as they contain sensitive information. Unfortunately, the Dropbox viewer on iOS doesn’t support this level of security and neither does Quick Office for the iPad. Therefore, I had to contact the office to have some documents and information sent to me instead. There is another app that may work (Documents to Go), but I have not tested it to see if it has a similar limitation.
  • Another thing I noticed, although it’s not a limitation of the iPad so much as it is a call to action for website owners and their designers: To prepare for customer and partner meetings, I review their websites and other materials in order to better understand their businesses. Unfortunately, I found that nearly 50% of the sites were not able to handle the browser on the iPad very well. Areas where pull downs were being used on their sites would not work, making it nearly impossible to read those sections if there wasn’t an alternative navigation scheme in place.
  • Our Exchange ActiveSync and iOS integration is awesome, but I get some pretty largeHTML emails from time to time that I have to review and provide feedback on, etc. Unfortunately, when you reply to emails like that, the iPad carries the HTML over to the reply and slows down the compose window. In some cases, this butchers the entire message. I wish there was a way to reply and strip the HTML to prevent this from happening.
  • As good as our Exchange ActiveSync implementation is, there isn’t a method to create folders in mail on the iPad. When I work with a new partner, I normally create a folder and move communication into the new folder. I can’t do that using the iOS mail client. However, our webmail interface (which works on the iPad) and our new mobile interface coming in SmarterMail 10 (which we are currently ALPHA testing on our production servers) DOES allow you to create folders and move messages into them.

That’s just a little bit of what I’ve learned so far. There have been a number of benefits from a consumption standpoint that I might discuss in my next post, including things like integration with my Plex media servers at home and using Photostream throughout the trip.

All-in-all, the iPad has really worked out well no matter which country we’re in or the connections we use. However, the overall impression, while positive, leaves me feeling a bit lost without the power and flexibility of my computers. We’ll see if that dissipates over time.

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Improve Customer Service and Agent Development with In-app Chat

March 29, 2012 by

Perhaps one of the more misunderstood features of SmarterTrack is its internal chat functionality. I’m not really talking about live chat—that’s primarily used to chat with external audiences, like your customers—I’m talking about the agent instant messenger and chat rooms.

Not everyone is aware of these fantastic tools, so I want explain how using agent instant messaging and chat rooms can help companies improve customer service without increasing costs.

It’s all about the benefits, baby!

One of the main reasons SmarterTrack’s internal chat features are somewhat overlooked is that many companies don’t realize the benefit of keeping their agent-to-agent communications within their helpdesk system. In fact, most companies allow agents to chat using third-party services like Yahoo! of Microsoft Live Messenger. While these services can be efficient, they can expose agents and companies to the potential of lost information and abuse. Besides, keeping agent chat an internal component of your helpdesk offers additional benefits that just aren’t available from third-party services :

  • It promotes collaboration. Instant messenger is the quickest, most efficient way to get clarification on an item, ask for assistance with an issue or get an opinion on the best way to craft a response. Sure, you can dash off an email or walk across the hall, but that’s not always necessary. Instant messaging is immediate and can provide a less intimidating method for employee communication.
  • It lends itself well to companies with agents working across multiple locations or from remote offices. Got an office in London and one in New York, but need your customer service teams to be in regular contact? No problem. Set up a permanent chat room in SmarterTrack for weekly team meetings. Chat room conversations are archived too, so your employees can always refer to the transcripts later if they need to.
  • It reduces costs. Overall, you’ll be spending less on employee training and development. Plus, well-trained employees usually equate to less problems and more sales.
  • It reduces churn. Because your agents are able to provide well-informed responses to inquiries, your customers will be happy. This means they’ll continue to use your product and even consider purchasing other products and services your company offers.
  • It’s archived. As with all communication channels within SmarterTrack, instant messenger and chat room conversations are stored within the helpdesk so managers or agents can refer to them later. This also makes it easy for companies to comply with regulatory standards like SOX and HIPAA.
  • It’s more secure. You could use a third-party instant messaging client like MSN or Yahoo! for internal communications, but then you’d have to set up all of your employees in that system and you’d rely on public services or servers. This means your internal communications are not as secure as they would be if you were using SmarterTrack for agent communication. In addition, agents using third-party services can usually connect with their family and friends who are also using the service, exposing them to the temptation of personal communications.

In other words, using SmarterTrack’s internal chat features can help companies improve their service levels effectively and inexpensively.

One thing about live chat…

SmarterTrack’s coaching and co-chat aid employee development. (Click pic to enlarge.)

There are a few live chat features relating to agent-to-agent communication, namely coaching and co-chat, that can further improve customer service levels. If you’re not using these features, you’re really missing out on a great employee development tool.

Co-chat allows a manager or senior agent to actively participate in a live chat session another agent is already working on. For example, customer XYZ is talking to agent John via live chat about a problem with a recent purchase. The customer is emotional, irate and does not like John’s answers and asks to speak to a manager. Rather than transferring the chat, the manager can join the live chat and chat alongside John to calm the customer down and find a resolution that all parties are satisfied with. In this case, we’re using co-chatting to “lead by example” and teach John how to best manage unhappy (and sometimes unreasonable) customers.

On the other hand, coaching can be used to assist an agent in chats from behind the scenes. Let’s say it is Jane’s first day answering live chats and the customer asks a question she doesn’t know the answer to. She can request real-time assistance from another agent, who will coach her through the correct response. It’s similar to co-chat, only the customer never knows that two agents were actually involved in the conversation for a few minutes.

Setting it all up

As luck would have it, we’ve got a few articles in the SmarterTrack.com Knowledge Base that cover our internal chat features. Take a look at these, and if you have questions, feel free to comment on this blog post.

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SmarterTrack 8.x BETA Available Now

March 27, 2012 by 19 Comments

SmarterTrack 8.x is turning out to be the largest and most important release of SmarterTrack since we originally released SmarterTicket, its precursor, back in 2004. We’ve always been committed to building products that offer enterprise-level features without the enterprise-level cost, and SmarterTrack 8.x is no exception. We took into account the feedback we’ve received from our customers through forum posts, feature requests and even face-to-face discussions and are pleased to announce the next release of our popular helpdesk and customer service software.

Getting started with the BETA

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the BETA, please visit the SmarterTrack 8.x BETA forum, where you’ll see how to:

  • Sign up for the BETA
  • Get a special BETA license key
  • Download the latest BETA release (we update it regularly)
  • Communicate with other BETA testers and the SmarterTools development team
  • Stay up-to-date on the latest release note and BETA news

Sign up for the BETA

Fully integrated softphone

SmarterTrack 8.x will have one of the most integrated SIP-compliant VoIP softphones of any helpdesk on the market and even includes multiple brand support. The softphone is configurable from within SmarterTrack, allowing all settings, profiles and agent information to be pushed to any desktop or laptop an agent logs into. This full-featured softphone includes the ability to transfer calls, automatically create call logs, displays incoming and outgoing communication history for a caller; can record incoming and outgoing calls; offers complete call analytics and allows businesses to keep all customer communications (tickets, live chats and call logs) in one location.

More user information

SmarterTrack 8.x continues to expand the amount of information about each customer by associating all communication within the helpdesk to a user’s email address and phone number. In addition, complete user statistics help you understand the frequency and method in which a customer communicates with your helpdesk. Finally, user comments have been added and can be displayed across tickets, live chats and call logs to help agents better assist customers.

Custom Fields

Easy access to custom fields

Custom fields are an incredibly powerful part of SmarterTrack. Some companies set up their helpdesks to: require users to provide answers to questions prior to starting tickets and live chats and store that information in custom fields; integrate with their existing billing systems and provisioning systems which automatically populate custom fields; allow agents to set custom fields based on information in ticket, live chats and call logs. With SmarterTrack 8.x, custom fields can now be placed in the communication area of tickets, live chats and call logs allowing the most critical of custom fields to be easily viewable and accessible. And as always, all custom fields can be associated to the Event system and can be fully reported on.

Completely revised task system

We’ve dramatically enhanced the tasks system. Tasks can now be assigned statuses like approved, in progress, on hold or completed and you can use the task scheduler to automatically create recurring tasks. Plus, managers can easily view global tasks by status or agent to get a better idea of what’s being worked on and when.

Customize with CSS

Customize your help desk without making changes to configuration files or changing skins! SmarterTrack 8.x allows system administrators to override CSS styles and customize the portal or management interface any way they want. So go ahead, move modules, change fonts or add a splash of color. Heck, redesign the whole portal. With custom CSS, you have the power to make your own design.

Simplify common actions into one click with manual events

Built upon SmarterTrack’s extensive event system, events can now be defined as manual. This means that instead of the system automatically triggering an event, a manual event can be created with specific criteria and actions that can be executed by an agent on a ticket, live chat or call log. Manual events can significantly increase the productivity of agents by eliminating the need to perform common actions individually; instead, multiple actions are performed with a single click. Here’s an example of how you might use this feature: you may want to transfer a ticket to another department, send a canned reply to the customer, adjust the custom fields in preparation to track the ticket, and SMS the agent that will receive the transferred ticket. Instead of an agent having to perform all of these actions separately, manual events can make all this happen with just one click!

Live Chat Agent Avatars

Get personal with avatars

Now you can add a personal touch to your tickets and live chats using agent avatars. Customers feel more at ease when they can see whom they’re dealing with. By using pictures of your agents, or even adding company or agent-specific avatars that are displayed during live chats and in tickets, you can help ensure your customers and end users stay in the right frame of mind throughout the entire support pipeline.

Custom RSS feeds

Feeding frenzy

Have a few RSS feeds you’d like to get in front of your customers? Perhaps you have separate RSS feeds for your blog, company news and social media accounts and want to make them easily accessible from one place? With SmarterTrack 8.x, you can centralize all of your important information in one location. You can even include feeds of your favorite news or industry blogs, further turning your portal into a true communication hub for your end users.

Better knowledge base management

We’ve revamped the knowledge base to make it easier to identify where articles are in the creation process and who is responsible for them. Now you can assign articles to agents, view a list of articles with broken links and quickly moderate customer feedback or ratings. Plus, see the path customers take as they browse your knowledge base: if they viewed another article prior, it’ll be listed as a referrer.

Improved helpdesk security

In an effort to build upon the need to fully separate different brands and departments, as well as to assist with the overall security of your helpdesk, agents now only see and interact with only those items that are assigned to their specific departments. In addition, take the security of your help desk up a notch by enforcing minimum password requirements for employee logins and enabling a setting that protects your system from brute force attacks by temporarily locking a user account if there are too many failed login attempts.

Improved categorization and organization

SmarterTrack 8.x introduces master categories. Configured by the system administrator, master categories are available on time logs and tasks to help managers see where an agent’s time is spent or to organize tasks related to a specific project.

Is that it?

Of course not! SmarterTrack 8.x has more features and improvements. You’ll find them all in the release notes we’ll post in the SmarterTrack 8.x BETA forum, but here are a few more that might be of interest:

  • Ticket responses can now be saved as drafts, so agents can come back and work on them later.
  • System administrators can now exclude response times that elapsed outside of business hours to ensure more accurate reporting.
  • The last agent to sign out of live chats or go AFK can now receive a warning message to lower the odds that your helpdesk goes unmanned.
  • Brand management is much simpler, even for companies with only one brand!
  • We made many more changes to the interface to increase the speed and responsiveness on both desktops and mobile devices. We also made modifications to regain much needed real estate, which is especially noticeable on tablets (like the new iPad) and on Android devices.

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Road Testing the New iPad

March 20, 2012 by 9 Comments

So the new iPad is out, and of course everyone is doing reviews of it. What most interesting, however, is that all of the reviews are essentially the same and mention the same things: The screen is beautiful, the device is a bit snappier with the A5x processor, more RAM is nice but it’s not really noticed due to the screen size, LTE is nice and doesn’t seem to be much of a drain on the battery, and speaking of the battery, with all the new things the life seems to be the same as the iPad 2. That’s a pretty good synopsis of about 75% of all of the reviews I’ve seen across the major technology blogs, though I may have an issue with the last item they cover: the battery life. More on that as I do some additional testing.

Well, I’m going to approach my review a bit differently. You see, I’m starting a 3-week trip through Europe, partly for business and partly for fun, and I’m going to challenge myself, and the latest and greatest from Apple, and see if I can use JUST the new iPad for business AND personal use throughout the trip.

As for the trip itself, we’re going to WorldHostingDays in Germany to participate in the hosting industry discussions, which is an important business channel for SmarterTools, and we have some appointments set up with many customers and business partners while we’re in here. After 5 days we will be heading to the Netherlands, France, and Italy, meeting customers and business partners along the way.

iPad for Business vs. the Kindle Fire

As you know from a few of my previous posts, I was fairly happy with the Kindle Fire as a side device for reading and occasional movies. This lasted for a short while but after waiting a few months for Amazon to offer up some updates it was very disappointing to see little change in the speed and responsiveness of Amazon’s Android OS. As I started traveling with the Fire the limit of storage started to become a problem as well, which surprised me as I didn’t think it would be an issue. Then it became clear that the kindle had VERY little hardware decoding support, which meant all DIVX videos had to be software decoded and the kindle fire wasn’t powerful enough to handle it. Each of these issues started wearing on my original, very positive impression.

So, I started to question the necessity for this device and watched the Amazon Store add titles painfully slowly and then the ones that were added were not the quality ones I was hoping for, and, to be honest, what I came to expect from titles in the Apple App Store. In addition, it was getting a little old buying apps on the Android Market Place (what is now called Play.google.com) and then side loading them to the Kindle Fire.

Reviewing the iPad as a Business Device

How else will my review differ? Well, for many average computer users, moving to a tablet for a trip like this is pretty simple. They’ll want to check email, update their favorite social network and keep up on news and that’s about it. However, as a fairly technical CEO I like get my hands dirty in technology – its the only way I know how to run a business. So, on top of the normal hardware discussions of the iPad, I’d like to look at how someone like myself could possibly make greater use of a tablet as their primary device. I am optimistic as I can use WebEX on the iPad to have meetings with our teams back at the office and go through software review sessions, login to servers via RDP and in a worst case scenario, I can always use LogMeIn to one of my iMac’s to work on a desktop, but this is only if I’m desperate.

A year ago I wouldn’t have undergone this test. To be honest, the SmarterTools products weren’t in a state that they are in today. However, with recent releases of SmarterMail 9.x mail server, SmarterTrack 7.x helpdesk and SmarterStats 7.x business analytics, we put a lot of focus on improving our Web interfaces to not only stay very advanced and functional on Desktop/Laptop but to ensure they work just as well on tablets. They’re not perfect just yet, and we’re continuing to make improvements to ensure that the experience is consistent and extremely responsive regardless of what device you’re on.

So wish me luck. I’m going to take a leap and spend 3 weeks with an iPad. I look forward to documenting the challenges and discussing both the positive and negative results I encounter. More importantly, I hope to get a glimpse into the future of the “Post-PC world” and see if normal users are capable of carrying, managing and conducting their entire lives in a slim 1.46lb device. Stay tuned.

Filed under SmarterTools, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , ,

There’s an Event for That

March 14, 2012 by

A customer posted a question in our community forums that got me thinking that it might be a good idea to create a series of blog posts that put a microscope to various powerful, but possibly little-known, features of SmarterTrack. As someone who uses and writes about SmarterTrack on a daily basis I tend to be a bit jaded when it comes to the numerous tools that are available for customers to use, and with something as feature-rich as SmarterTrack it can be difficult to showcase every little thing that it can do on our website or even in videos. Hopefully, these blog posts will help pull the curtain back on SmarterTrack as well as demonstrate how extensive a product it really is.

So, this particular customer wanted to know if it was possible to have an email support ticket automatically assigned to an agent based on a word, or words, in the subject line of the ticket. I replied that it certainly WAS possible to do this by using a system event, and gave a brief overview of how to do it and where to find the settings to make it so. Their reply, though effusive in thanks, struck a cord when they exclaimed “No wonder I didn’t find it…!! Buried deep, but still fantastic!” The event system built within SmarterTrack is possibly one of the most powerful, not to mention useful, features of the entire product. That being said, it is also one of the more complex and misunderstood features. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look and see if we can shed some light on this somewhat intimidating set of tools.

Consider the following scenarios. Though not an exhaustive list of the capabilities of the event system, it’s a good representation of what is available:

  • You are expecting a ticket from a Very Important Client, and you want that ticket to be handled by your best networking specialist.
  • Similarly, you want your Networking Manger to know when that ticket comes in so that they can monitor how the ticket is handled.
  • An agent is in charge of reviewing knowledge base articles prior to the articles going live to end users.
  • A live chat customer becomes abusive to an agent, using profanity and threatening the agent with physical harm.
  • You want to set, and maintain, a service level for tickets and live chats and need to actively monitor both.
  • You have an expectation set for survey scores and want to know when returned surveys don’t meet those expectations.
  • There is a landing page on your website that is exclusive to a specific ad campaign that is being run and you want to know when someone hits that page and invite them to live chat an agent.

Each of these scenarios can be handled using either user-level or system events. Basically, events allow SmarterTrack users to stay on top of what is going on within their helpdesk and even be notified when certain criteria are met for any email ticket, live chat, website visit (using Who’s On events), call log, survey or even task. Events are distributed between the user-level and overall system level. User-level events are just those: set and managed by specific users. System events, on the other hand, are a bit more detailed and wide-reaching and can only be created and managed by system administrators.

Where do you find the events menu items so that you can start exploring this powerful and extremely beneficial tool? User-level events are on the Settings page, under My Settings, shown below (click on the image for a larger version):

As mentioned, system events are only available to system administrators, so they’re “buried” under System Settings, as shown below (again, click the image for a larger version):

As for creating events, it’s a pretty simple process: you just select the event category – bascially the feature you want to have the event created for, like email tickets, live chats, etc. – and then the specific action that occurs to trigger the event, say when a ticket is created or a live chat sits idle for too long. Once you have those set, you go in and fully customize the entire set of criteria to be met for that event to fire off, and then how you want the event handled once it does fire off. Below you’ll see a series of screenshots that demonstrate the extent to which you can customize events and actions. DO  NOT be dismayed – it may look intimidating but it’s laid out very logically and pretty simple to understand once you go in and start creating and customizing things.

Creating a new event

Selecting event criteria

Notification settings

So that’s a look at the event system within SmarterTrack. We built it to be exceedingly powerful, fully customizable and exremely helpful for keeping involved with customers and with what is going on within your entire customer service and support programs. More information of the event system can be found within our help documentation, but the best thing to do is go in and start creating some events. Play around with the functionality and feature set and you’ll soon see how indispensible the system will become in providing you with complete control and understanding of your customer service and support infrastructure. Feel free to post a comment, ask a question or even give us some ideas on how you’re using the event system to provide unparalleled support to your customers. Thanks for reading.

Filed under SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, SmarterTrack.com Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

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