How AfterSell by Rokt Streamlines Customer Support Across Intercom and Slack With ClearFeed

A Collaborative Effort for Seamless Support

AfterSell's support strategy leverages two distinct teams to streamline support workflows and ensure optimal merchant experiences.

1. Merchant Success Team: These customer-facing representatives act as the first line of defense for merchants. This Slack-first team maintains a strong relationship with AfterSell’s enterprise customers by creating dedicated Slack channels for real-time communication and tailored guidance.
   
   Their proactive approach includes monitoring each merchant's dedicated Slack channels and ensuring prompt assistance. For more complex queries requiring in-depth investigation, the Merchant Success team escalates issues by creating detailed support tickets within Intercom.
2. Customer Support Team: This specialized team primarily operates within Intercom to tackle queries from non-enterprise merchants and is also involved in handling intricate technical queries passed on by the Merchant Success team that demand thorough analysis and resolution. Their focus lies on swift resolution and keeping merchants informed through consistent updates and communication within the Intercom interface.

The synergy between the Merchant Success and Customer Support teams is central to AfterSell's exceptional support experience. AfterSell adopted Slack for several reasons:

1. Meet Customers Where They Are: AfterSell’s enterprise customers prefer Slack over traditional ticketing platforms like Intercom to raise support requests as it offers a more interactive and familiar communication environment.
2. White Glove Service: Slack enables AfterSell to deliver personalized and high-touch support to enterprise customers by reducing communication friction.
3. Build Deep Connections: Slack helps create a partnership rather than a transactional relationship, making customers feel like AfterSell is part of their team.

This setup allows AfterSell to benefit from Slack's immediacy and collaborative interface while leveraging Intercom’s structured ticketing for comprehensive issue management.

The Challenges

As AfterSell expanded its business, the customer-facing teams started facing challenges in maintaining this dual-platform approach. The main challenge was ensuring seamless communication and coordination between the two teams while managing support queries across both Slack and Intercom

• Platform Silos between Slack and Intercom: The absence of integration between Slack and Intercom created platform silos. The Support team had to monitor both Slack and Intercom, leading to inefficiencies, missed messages, and potential delays in responding to high-priority merchants in Slack.
  

• Unclear Request Handling: There was no clarity on who was working on a specific request reported in Slack, the request status, or how many requests were being resolved on a particular day.
  

• Difficulty in Measuring Team’s Productivity: The absence of service metrics in Slack such as response time, issue closure rate, and overall time taken to resolve an issue made it difficult to manage and plan capacity better.
  

These challenges highlighted the need for a more streamlined and integrated Slack-first ticketing system that could enhance the efficiency of handling support requests in Slack and integrate seamlessly with their ticketing system, Intercom. The team at AfterSell started looking for a solution that offered:

1. Ease of Use and Integration: The solution needed to be user-friendly and easily integrated into their existing workflow without disrupting daily operations.
2. Bi-Directional Integration: It should facilitate seamless communication and data exchange between Slack and Intercom, ensuring updates are synchronized in both directions.
3. Low Maintenance Requirements: The chosen solution had to be low-maintenance, requiring minimal effort to integrate and manage, thus reducing the operational burden on the support team.
4. Leveraging Existing SLAs and Workflows on Intercom: The solution must be capable of leveraging and incorporating their existing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and workflows within Intercom to maintain consistency in support quality and performance metrics.

The ClearFeed Advantage

After evaluating several support tools in the market, AfterSell adopted ClearFeed, which checked all the boxes for their requirements. ClearFeed streamlined support across Slack and Intercom, enhancing team efficiency and support experience for their premium customers.

1. Unified view of customer requests: Before ClearFeed, tracking and prioritizing customer messages was chaotic, often leading to lost messages. ClearFeed's Triage Channel on Slack centralizes all customer requests from 200+ Slack channels ensuring better alignment and prioritization of requests.
2. One-Click Intercom Ticket Creation: With ClearFeed, the AfterSell team can effortlessly convert a Slack thread into an Intercom ticket by adding a ticket emoji to the initial message. Any attachments within the thread are automatically included in the ticket, ensuring all pertinent details are captured.
3. Bi-Directional Sync Between Slack and Intercom: ClearFeed enables seamless two-way synchronization between Slack threads and Intercom tickets. Responses, attachments, and ticket status updates in Intercom are relayed back to the corresponding Slack thread and vice versa, keeping all team members informed and aligned.
4. Efficient Tracking of Ownership and Status of All Customer Requests: Team members could take ownership of and resolve requests using Emojis in Slack. The status of the request is regularly updated, ensuring both the Merchant Success and Customer Support teams have a shared understanding of ownership and current progress.
5. Detailed Service Metrics in Slack: ClearFeed reports key service metrics directly in Slack, including request load, response times, time to closure, and first touch resolution percentage. These metrics enable the Merchant Success team to monitor performance, understand individual contributions, and make data-driven decisions to enhance support efficiency.
6. Comprehensive Reporting and Analysis: ClearFeed's dashboard offers a comprehensive view of all support activities. Advanced filters allow detailed analysis of requests, including SLA status and issue categorization. This level of insight is instrumental in identifying areas for improvement and planning future strategies.

Results

The implementation of ClearFeed transformed AfterSell’s support workflow. Customers could raise tickets through Slack, and discussion threads could be converted into Intercom tickets, ensuring unified support and efficient query resolution.

• Optimized Team Collaboration and Efficiency: The adoption of ClearFeed resulted in better collaboration between the internal teams. Now, all customer-facing teams participate in the support process, enabling subject matter experts to contribute directly to issue resolution.
  
  Additionally, reducing manual effort for ticket categorization and updates facilitated smoother operational workflows, allowing teams to focus more on issue resolution rather than administrative tasks.
  

• Scaling Premium Support in Slack: ClearFeed has empowered AfterSell to scale its premium support in Slack effectively. AfterSell now handles 250+ requests across 200+ Slack channels while maintaining the high-touch, personalized service that their premium customers expect.
  
• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: The faster response times and more efficient support processes contributed to enhanced customer satisfaction, fostering stronger trust and relationships with their merchants.
  

Wrapping Up

ClearFeed's integration between Slack and Intercom has transformed AfterSell’s support operations, creating a unified workflow across Slack and Intercom, eliminating the inefficiencies of dual-platform monitoring, and improving team collaboration. The result is a more efficient, responsive, and scalable support system. 

If you are curious to learn how ClearFeed can streamline and enhance your support in Slack, contact us at support@clearfeed.ai or book a free customized product walkthrough with our support experts.