How ScanPay Collaborates on Support Across Slack & Freshdesk Using ClearFeed

Summary

Challenge
As ScanPay expanded, managing customer support across multiple channels - Slack, Freshdesk, email, and chat - became increasingly difficult. While teams preferred Slack for internal collaboration, the lack of integration between Slack and Freshdesk led to fragmented communication. Internal discussions on Slack weren’t automatically captured in Freshdesk, resulting in incomplete context for the support team. Manually logging tickets was time-consuming, and using multiple tools risked inefficiencies, missed information, and inconsistent customer service.

‍Solution
ScanPay adopted ClearFeed to bridge the gap between Slack and Freshdesk. ClearFeed’s two-way sync ensured that internal discussions on Slack were automatically logged as internal comments in Freshdesk. Features like automated ticket creation, collaboration in ClearFeed’s Triage Channel, and seamless handling of email and chat inquiries allowed ScanPay to streamline communication and improve cross-team collaboration without forcing the sales and account teams to learn Freshdesk.

‍Impact
Implementing ClearFeed transformed ScanPay’s support workflow. In just 3 months, over 750+ Freshdesk tickets were collaborated on through Slack, with around 5,000+ comments posted from Slack. Notably, 25% of the tickets had more than 8 comments on Slack, reflecting the level of internal collaboration required for complex customer issues

As a financial services company, trust is the cornerstone of ScanPay’s relationship with its clients. These small and medium-sized businesses rely heavily on a trusted, human touch when dealing with sensitive payment and invoicing processes making it crucial for ScanPay to maintain strong, personalized relationships with their customers at every stage of their journey. To deliver this high-touch support, ScanPay structured its support function into three key teams:

1. Sales Team: Operating primarily in the field, the sales team builds and maintains customer relationships through direct channels like Phone, WhatsApp, and Text messages.
2. Account Managers: Account managers onboard customers and handle ongoing relationships, ensuring clients receive prompt, personalized support through direct communication channels.
3. Support Team: On the technical side, ScanPay’s support team manages customer inquiries through Freshdesk, their ticketing system, focusing on more complex issues raised via email and chat. This team complements the work of the account managers by providing deeper technical support, ensuring customer issues are resolved efficiently.

Adoption of Slack as the Central Collaboration Hub

While ScanPay’s team structure allowed them to deliver personalized support to customers, it also presented challenges in maintaining seamless collaboration and consistency across internal teams.

Different teams were operating in silos: account managers, sales, and engineering teams were Slack-first, while the support team primarily worked out of Freshdesk to manage customer inquiries coming through email and chat.

To streamline internal communication, ScanPay adopted Slack as its central collaboration hub. Key reasons for choosing Slack included:

1. Real-time Communication: Slack enabled instant, real-time communication between different teams, making it easier to resolve customer queries quickly.
2. Familiarity: All internal teams were already familiar with Slack, making it easy to adopt without significant learning curves.
3. Centralized Collaboration: Slack allowed all team members to collaborate in one place, making it easier to discuss customer issues internally.

The Challenge: Fragmented Communication Across Slack and Freshdesk

Although Slack helped streamline internal collaboration, the lack of integration between Slack and Freshdesk created several operational challenges:

• Siloed Conversations: Account Management & Sales teams communicated with customers via different channels like email or chat, but these interactions, along with internal Slack discussions, weren’t automatically captured in Freshdesk. This left the support team without full context when handling technical issues.
  
• Manual Ticket Creation: When a customer raised an issue through a direct channel, the sales team had to manually log the details in Slack, tag relevant team members, and additionally create tickets in Freshdesk. This process was time-consuming and prone to errors.
  
• Learning Multiple Tools: ScanPay wanted to avoid forcing their field teams and account managers, who are Slack-first, to learn Freshdesk, which was primarily used by the technical support team.
  
• Difficulty in Tracking Customer History: With customer conversations spread across Slack and Freshdesk, teams struggled to track previous interactions or find a unified view of a customer’s history. This led to inefficiencies and the risk of repeating efforts or overlooking important details.
  
• Missed Context in Freshdesk: Since not all customer conversations were synced with Freshdesk, support agents often lacked full visibility into a customer’s history, forcing them to ask for details that had already been discussed with the account managers.

To address these challenges, ScanPay needed a solution to bridge the gap between Slack and Freshdesk, allowing them to streamline communication and improve efficiency.

The ClearFeed Advantage

Initially, ScanPay tried out tools like Halp, which offered some of the functionality they needed. However, Halp had been acquired by Jira, and ScanPay found that it didn’t fully meet their requirements. 

ScanPay was looking for a lightweight ticketing system to bridge multiple communication channels without requiring extensive training or disrupting their existing workflows. ClearFeed checked all their boxes.

1. Unify Communication Channels: ClearFeed brought together multiple communication channels - Slack, email, and chat - into a single system of record in Freshdesk. This allowed different teams to collaborate effortlessly, ensuring no information was lost and customer issues were resolved quickly.
2. One-Click Freshdesk Ticket Creation: ClearFeed allows for easy conversion of Slack threads into Freshdesk tickets. This enables internal teams to start conversations on Slack and move issues needing longer-term resolution to Freshdesk.
3. Two-way Sync Between Slack and Freshdesk: ClearFeed enables seamless two-way synchronization between Slack threads and Freshdesk 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. 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 service teams to monitor performance, understand individual contributions, and make data-driven decisions to enhance support efficiency.
5. 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.