Timely Resolution is POSist’s Secret Sauce to Customer Support

POSist is a cloud-based Restaurant Technology Platform that provides complete automation of restaurant operations. It is also one of Freshdesk’s customers. Providing support to over 5000 businesses, across 100+ cities is no easy task. We wanted to find out how, with small team they handled over 200 tickets each day. We spoke to Rajeev Chenthamarakshan, General Manager of Technical Support at POSist and here’s how our conversation went.

What according to POSist is customer happiness and how do you measure it?

Well, customer happiness can be really difficult to measure. Timely response is more important than actually resolving the query; it gives customers the satisfaction that their concerns have been acknowledged.

For us, resolving the queries in a timely manner while adhering to the SLA is customer happiness, and we do get appreciation mails when we help our users in a sticky spot.

What are the tools that you or your agents use to handle customer support at POSist?

We use Freshdesk and Exotel.

Why did you choose Freshdesk as your helpdesk software? How have things been in customer support since then?

As we were growing, support became mission critical for our customers. While our agents were doing or best to support the clients, but as the number of agents and the number of tickets per customer increased, it started to become cumbersome and borderline impossible to keep a track of the tickets and resolution per ticket per customer.

Freshdesk cleaned all of this for us from the day 1, and helped us reduce the ticket resolution time from around 2.5 hours to 46 minutes! Our clients also appreciated us as Freshdesk helped maintain a single thread for all the conversations over email.

What are you favorite Freshdesk features and how do you use them?

Freshdesk has really helped us streamline and scale our support efforts at POSist. The SLA feature helps us maintain quality in the sense that a particular ticket is resolved within a time frame. It also intimates if the SLA of a particular ticket is violated. This helps us monitor the KPI and staff performance.

How did you scale customer support at POSist, while keeping the culture and core values intact AND making sure customers end up happy?

Our customer base has grown steeply in the last 2 years. Currently we are onboarding 200 customers every month. Onboarding new customers, while ensuring the happiness of existing ones can get challenging. To ensure quality and consistency in our efforts, we have set a SLA that is followed diligently. It can get overwhelming at times, so we assign priority to the tickets. Setting processes and standards helps us adhere to our core values which is achieving customer satisfaction.

What’s your most memorable customer interaction?

There are too many to recount! There have been multiple instances when we’ve brought smiles to our customer’s faces. And sometimes it is as silly as the printer not being connected to the power point! Once we received a frantic call from a restaurant owner at 1 am that the bills were not being generated and that he had to settle a bill worth 1.5 lac immediately or his customer would walk out without paying the bill. Turned out that the bills were being generated just fine, their printer was not connected!

Tell me about a time when you’re most proud of when you made a customer extremely happy?

Resolving customer queries even at 3 am in the morning, and be available them round the clock is something we’re really proud of. When customers call at the wee hours of the morning and we solve their queries, they are extremely thankful and appreciative of our efforts.

Sometimes certain incidents happen that lead to a sudden surge of queries. For instance, during the GST implementation, we had a huge influx of calls asking about the new updates. Although it was a minor update, we had to deal with over 9000 calls in 2 days, educating customers with the new GST norms.  The entire team worked continuously for 48 hours straight and that was a huge achievement for us.

What’s the best thing about working for POSist? What is the key thing that makes your customer support great?

Coming from the hospitality background, I have a certain soft spot for the restaurant industry. It feels great to be a part of a system that is working to solve the problems of the restaurant space. In the recent years, technology has made great strides in the restaurant industry, yet a majority of our customers, that is, the restaurant owners, aren’t as savvy with technology. It feels great to educate the customers that their daily operations can be streamlined with just a single click! In the end, we are all working to make the restaurant industry a better place.

The culture and team spirit at POSist is amazing! We try to inculcate the feeling that being a support agent is not just a job; it’s contributing to the tech-revolution of the restaurant industry. Another thing that sets us apart from other companies is that we provide 24×7 support.

Tell me about a really tough call and how you handled it.

Sometimes customers can get really bullish about a feature request in the software. We explain it to them that these things take time and make them understand the process. Most of the times they understand and agree to what we say, the other times, we just smile and keep our patience.

What’s your biggest challenge in providing great support at POSist?

It is a funny thing, actually! Customers often give us a missed call instead of a full ring, which sometimes leads to calls getting unnoticed. Automatic ticket generation helps us keep a track of the queries but it gets difficult to call back customers.

What’s your biggest time-saving trick?

The best thing to do is to try and resolve the tickets the same day itself. When you postpone it to do later, it piles on to the next day’s work. Also, you must be empowered enough to answer customer queries right there. So, it is important to have a sound knowledge of the product.

What do you find most rewarding about being a customer support agent? What makes everything worth it?

If you see a customer happy, it makes your day. For us, it can be something really trivial, but for a customer it is a big deal. We get appreciation emails and calls and that propel us to keep delivering a stellar service.

What’s the greatest piece of advice you’ve ever received? (with respect to customer support)

Stick to the basics. Customers don’t want a lot, just want to be heard patiently. While resolution is important, it is secondary. Hearing them out is more important.

What do you think is the secret sauce to customer happiness?

Timely resolution of queries! At the end of the day, what customers ultimately want is to get their issues resolved. The sooner you do it, the happier your customers will be.

What does a typical day look like?

Since we have a 24×7 support, we work in shifts. The day starts at 8 am, and we take the handover from the Night Shift team. We wait for customers to call and handle their problems. We create feature requests from customers, follow up on the unresolved queries if any, forward bug reports to the development team.

We are continuously monitoring what’s happening on the floor. Since we have a progressive product there are a number of new features and product releases. If there are new updates, we watch out for calls to help customers through the features.

What do you look for in your support reps? And how do you test for those traits? Do you ask specific questions?

Being a support agent is tough. You get to deal with all types of people, some can even get agitated and unreasonable at times. A support rep should be able to handle customers at their good and bad. The key trait that we look for in our support reps in patience and calmness. Having a presence of mind and empathy is also important to hear out a customer and responding to him.

We generally look for people coming from a similar background who have worked in customer handling before, and have an aptitude to learn. It can get difficult to gauge someone’s personality from just 1-2 interview interactions, so we make it a point to list out the job description clearly and the dedication it requires to be a support agent.

How did you end up in customer support?

I have done hotel management and worked closely with the hospitality industry. It just made sense to join a company that was working in the same domain. I was working previously with another tech company that was specifically looking for Hotel Management graduates for implementation. From there I have always been involved in support and implementation.

Well, that’s how they roll at POSist. If you are looking for a helpdesk software to help you handle your support tickets, you know where to find us.

Related Posts

Be human, be there for the customer — Feedly’s Secret Sauce to Great Customer Support

(Visual) Communication — the Secret Sauce to Customer Support at CloudApp