How Astronomer Scales Personalized and Premium Customer Support in Slack with ClearFeed

Customer Success Managers, Technical Advisors, and Renewal Managers are Slack-first teams that provide ongoing high-touch support over the customers' lifecycle. The Support team primarily interacts with customers via Zendesk tickets and meetings as needed.

These teams work together to provide a seamless support experience, with Slack as the core of their communication strategy. Astronomer adopted Slack for several key reasons:

1. Customer Engagement: Customers can contact Astronomer's support teams using a familiar tool where they already work, ensuring ease of access. 
2. Real-Time Interaction: Slack provides real-time, in-situ conversations, unlike traditional email.
3. Seamless Collaboration: With Astronomer’s employees and customers spread across different time zones, Slack enables seamless collaboration irrespective of location.

This setup allows Astronomer to benefit from Slack's immediacy and collaboration while maintaining Zendesk's structured process for comprehensive issue management.

The Challenges

While Slack significantly improved the immediacy and efficiency of Astronomer's customer support, the company began facing substantial challenges as it expanded. The increase in customers, employees, and Slack channels led to a lack of consistency and manageability, creating a disorganized environment that hindered effective communication with customers.

1. Lack of a single queue of customer requests: With the expansion in Slack channels, the team lacked a unified view or a 'single pane of glass' from where they could manage all their customer issues and ensure everything was solved.
2. Unclear request handling: There was no clarity on who was working on a specific request reported on Slack, the request status, or how many requests were being resolved on a particular day.
3. Platform silos: The absence of integration between Slack and Zendesk created platform silos. This disconnection made it challenging to track and manage customer interactions effectively across different tools.
4. 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, Zendesk.

The ClearFeed Advantage

After evaluating a few support tools in the market, Astronomer adopted ClearFeed to streamline and scale its support on Slack. ClearFeed plugs into Astronomer’s customer Slack channels and integrates with Zendesk, their ticketing platform.

• 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 various channels, including email and Slack. This unified view helps track customers' lifecycle phases and routes requests to the appropriate employees.
  
• Track ownership and status of all user requests: Team members can easily take ownership and resolve requests using Slack emojis. ClearFeed's dashboard makes it simple to find unresolved or unassigned requests, allowing the team to act immediately.
• Syncing Slack to Tickets: ClearFeed allows for easy conversion of Slack threads into Zendesk tickets. This enables customers to start conversations on Slack and move issues needing longer-term resolution to Zendesk. The two-way sync ensures customers are updated on Slack when tickets are resolved in Zendesk and vice versa.
• Broadcast updates to multiple customers: ClearFeed’s Announcement feature provides a centralized location for distributing content like product updates, release notes, upcoming webinars, and company announcements.
  
• 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

After implementing ClearFeed, Astronomer has seen a noticeable impact on their team's operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

• Efficient Handling of High-Volume Requests: With ClearFeed's Slack integration, Astronomer has significantly elevated its support capabilities, ensuring all customer Slack channels are being adequately monitored and responded to. The team effectively manages 300+ requests on Slack every month, across 100+ Slack Channels, demonstrating a robust and efficient support system.
  
• Optimized Team Collaboration: The adoption of ClearFeed resulted in better collaboration between the internal teams. 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.

• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: The faster response times and more efficient support processes contributed to enhanced customer satisfaction, fostering stronger customer trust.
  

Wrapping Up

Astronomer’s adoption of ClearFeed marks a pivotal advancement in their customer support strategy. This integration streamlined their issue resolution process and enhanced their ability to provide real-time, high-touch support to their customers. 

With enhanced visibility and more organized support workflows, Astronomer is now better equipped to maintain exceptional service standards with a growing customer base while 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 in Slack, contact us at support@clearfeed.ai or book a free customized product walkthrough with our support experts.