Case Study

How Airmeet Streamlined Support Escalations and Enhanced Engineering Productivity with ClearFeed’s Slack-first Helpdesk

With Vinay Jaasti, Co-founder and CTO at Airmeet
Kevin Carroll Profile Picture

Company Goal

Founded in August 2019, Airmeet is an all-in-one platform for virtual summits, meetups & workshops with a social lounge to deliver a rich networking experience. Airmeet's mission is to empower organizations and communities to achieve effective collective progress in the world of virtual events.

https://www.airmeet.com/

HeadQuarters

Bangalore, India

Industry

SAAS

Summary

Challenge
Airmeet, a leader in virtual event platforms, faced challenges in managing support requests and engineering responses during live events. The team struggled with tracking requests scattered across Slack channels and lacked service metrics to measure the engineering team's productivity and responsiveness.

Solution
With ClearFeed’s Slack integration, Airmeet streamlined support escalations and gained full visibility on key service metrics like closure time, the volume of requests, and first-time response rates on Slack. This enhanced the overall productivity and responsiveness of the Engineering team.

Results
ClearFeed's integration with Airmeet led to notable improvements across various domains. Engineering productivity saw a boost with better tracking of key metrics. The team efficiently managed a high volume of support tickets, crucial for live event success. This efficiency, coupled with improved workflows, enhanced team collaboration and accelerated issue resolution. Consequently, faster and more effective support responses significantly increased customer satisfaction during live events.

About Airmeet

Airmeet is a leading virtual event and networking platform renowned for hosting various online events such as workshops, conferences, webinars, and meetups. The platform excels in creating a vibrant, interactive space that mirrors the ambiance of in-person events in a virtual setting. Attendees are immersed in an environment where they can actively participate in live sessions, panel discussions, Q&A rounds, and networking lounges.

Streamlining Customer Support for Live Events

In the world of live virtual events, the margin for error is slim, and the cost of technical glitches can be significant, not just in terms of immediate disruption but also in long-term user trust and satisfaction. The nature of live events demands immediate action to any technical hiccup or user query to ensure a seamless experience.

Airmeet’s engineering team, with its technical expertise, is often at the forefront of resolving complex issues that might arise during an event. However, they rely on real-time information and feedback from customer support and product teams to understand and address these issues effectively.

To facilitate this high level of internal collaboration and responsiveness, Airmeet adopted Slack as a primary communication channel. This involved setting up dedicated Slack channels categorized based on the urgency and nature of the issues reported.  

Live Issue Channel: For immediate resolution of problems during live events.
RCA Channel:
For post-event analysis and communication of solutions.
Internal Bug Reporting: For addressing bugs encountered in internal operations.

Any customer issue was promptly routed to one of these Slack channels. The on-call manager from the Engineering or Product Support team would then take immediate action, depending on the nature of the issue. This ensured customers received swift and timely assistance.

The Challenges

While Slack significantly improved the immediacy and efficiency of Airmeet's customer support, it also presented several challenges in the initial setup.

"More metrics, more info is always appreciated"
  1. Fragmented Request Tracking Across Multiple Channels: The Airmeet team struggled with the complexity of managing customer requests scattered across various Slack channels. This fragmentation led to difficulties in efficient tracking and resolving requests. 
  2. Manual Process of Managing Requests: A significant portion of the team's day was dedicated to meticulously sifting through Slack channels. They had to isolate requests from general conversations, categorize them appropriately, and then manually file them as tickets in their project management tool, Shortcut.
  3. Inefficient Record Keeping: Each issue reported on Slack needed to be manually logged into Google Sheets for tracking and analysis. This manual entry system was not only labour-intensive but also increased the risk of inaccuracies and delays. Even though some parts of this are automated, the reliance on Google Sheets for weekly reviews of open and closed issues added an extra layer of complexity to their support operations.
  4. Lack of Visibility on Request Handling: There was no clarity on who is working on a specific request reported on Slack, the request status or how many requests were being resolved on a particular day. 
  5. Difficulty in Measuring Team’s Productivity and Responsiveness: Measuring team and individual productivity was a complex task, as the time spent on Slack handling requests wasn't quantified. Lack of service metrics on 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 while providing clear metrics for productivity and issue resolution on Slack.

The ClearFeed Advantage

After evaluating a few support tools in the market, Airmeet turned to ClearFeed to streamline support escalations on Slack and drive the efficiency of the Engineering team. 

  • Unified view of customer requests: Before ClearFeed, there was chaos in keeping track of which messages came in first, prioritizing them, and sometimes even losing track of messages. With the ClearFeed Triage channel on Slack, all customer requests across channels are centralized in one place ensuring better alignment and prioritization of requests.  
  • Track ownership and status of all user requests: Team members could take ownership of and resolve requests using Emojis in Slack. ClearFeed's dashboard allows the team to easily find unresolved or unassigned requests and immediately act on them.
  • Access to Service Metrics on Slack: ClearFeed reports key service metrics like request load, response times, time to closure, and first touch resolution percentage. These metrics are critical for Airmeet’s weekly reviews, tracking the use and allocation of resources, and understanding individual contributions. The leadership team at Airmeet now has better visibility on the hours spent by the Engineering team on Slack and the time taken to resolve requests both individually and collectively.
  • Comprehensive Reporting and Analysis: The manager dashboard provided by ClearFeed offered Airmeet a comprehensive view of all support activities. Advanced filters allowed for detailed analysis of requests, including SLA status and issue categorization. This level of insight was instrumental in identifying areas for improvement and planning future strategies.

Results

ClearFeed’s Slack integration had a noticeable impact on Airmeet’s Engineering team's operational efficiency.

  • Enhanced Team Productivity & KPI Tracking: ClearFeed enabled Airmeet to effectively measure the team’s KPIs on Slack and provided a means to demonstrate the productivity of the tech team, which was not possible earlier.
Veena S @Airmeet Testimonial
  • Efficient Handling of High-Volume Requests: With ClearFeed's Slack integration, Airmeet has significantly elevated its support capabilities. The team effectively manages around 160 tickets each month, demonstrating a robust and efficient support system, crucial for the dynamic and fast-paced world of virtual events.
  • Optimized Team Collaboration : The adoption of ClearFeed resulted in better collaboration between the Event Success and Engineering teams. Also, reducing manual effort for ticket categorization and updates facilitated smoother operational workflows, allowing teams to focus more on issue resolution rather than administrative tasks.
  • Customer Satisfaction and Long-Term Partnership: The faster response times and more efficient support processes contributed to enhanced customer satisfaction. This improvement in support operations has fostered stronger customer trust and loyalty, laying the foundation for a lasting partnership with ClearFeed. 
Vinay Jaasti @Airmeet Testimonial

Wrapping Up

Airmeet's adoption of ClearFeed marks a significant advancement in its customer support and engineering efficiency approach. This integration has streamlined their issue resolution process, significantly boosting the productivity of their Engineering team. 

With enhanced visibility and more organized support workflows, Airmeet is now better equipped to handle the dynamic challenges of virtual event management, ensuring a smoother experience for both their team and their customers.

If you are curious to learn how ClearFeed can streamline and enhance your support operations, you can reach out to us at support@clearfeed.ai, join our community Slack channel, or book a customized product walkthrough with our support experts. 

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