TeamSupport review

Overview:

The TeamSupport story follows a familiar arc: people working in the Customer Support industry keep coming up against the same headaches, same obstacles that plague the landscape. They get together, and develop the solution they wish they’d had all along. This backstory is an increasingly common template in the technology industry, mainly because it combines first-hand experience with highly specific and achievable goals. The result is a great sigh of relief from its users, and a benchmark for other companies to strive for.

TeamSupport endeavors to address the bigger picture in Customer Support. Rather than just resolve ticket after ticket, they make it their purpose to get behind the technical complaints, and track the root causes of those complaints, helping the customer in the process. This allows you to focus your energy on resolving the problems within your business that generate complaints, rather than just appeasing customers on a case-by- case basis.

But perhaps the greatest offering from TeamSupport is its namesake: the idea that the best support comes from a team, rather than an individual. TeamSupport battles the communication breakdown between teams and departments, which translates to the highest possible quality of support for your customers.

If this sounds like the answer to your Customer Support puzzle, read our full review.

Pricing:

TeamSupport comes with a standard 14-day free trial period, which you may sign up for with no credit card required. When you’re ready for a paid subscription, they offer two simple pricing tiers:

• Support Desk: $30 per agent per month
• Enterprise: $40 per agent per month
  The Enterprise package includes Product & Version Tracking and Inventory Tracking.

Web-hosted or Licensed:

Web-hosted

Hardware and Software Requirements:

TeamSupport is hosted online, and can be accessed from any updated computer with Internet access.

Specific Size of Business (or Company Size):

Since your subscription to TeamSupport us based on the number of agents using it, it can scale right along with you as you grow. If you have a handful of customer emails to iron out every month, TeamSupport might be a bit of overkill. But as soon as you employ a small team, all the way up to an Enterprise-sized Customer Support department, TeamSupport can handle any volume.

Features:

TeamSupport offers the standard batch of features, but goes the extra mile with a few rarer perks as well. My personal favorite is their ability to let customers record their screen and send it to your support agent. This allows the agent to better diagnose and remedy problems, without going through the more common (and slightly unnerving) screen sharing method.

Here are the highlights of their Features list:

• Screen Recording
• Internal Social Network
• Automations and Filters
• Live Chat – saves customer transcripts
• Reporting and Metrics
• Flagging System
• API Connectivity

If you would like to browse a more detailed view of their features, navigate to their page here.

Integrations and Add-Ons:

TeamSupport partners well with MailChimp, Dropbox, Screenr, Facebook, and Zapier.

Ease of Use:

Getting started with TeamSupport was not quite as painless as I had hoped. Signing up brought me to a page with several links to get me going, which I appreciated, but those resources were hit-or-miss. The first link, a Software Tour video hosted on YouTube, charged ahead at a blindingly quick pace, machine gunning information at me faster than I could track with. At the conclusion of the video, I felt much more blindsided than informed.

The other links were to their online documentation and Knowledge Base, which were fairly well organized. However, their introductory email was the saving grace. It was brief, friendly, and informative. It told me what to expect during my trial period, including when they would check in with me throughout the trial period. It was also much more forthcoming with contact information, providing a phone number and direct email address to get in touch with their support team.

As for the software itself, my report is mostly positive. The UX is graphical enough to not be tiresome, and a completely uninitiated user will be able to find most everything they need without an extensive search. The left and right sidebars keep everything you need within a few mouse clicks, and the widely customizable fields will make the interface feel more like a natural extension of your business.

In the future, I hope to see improvements to their onboarding videos. These should be well paced, and the videos should be brief walkthroughs of the basic functions and foremost features. They should also be embedded in the TeamSupport website, rather than bouncing the user to YouTube.

Finally, I direct you to our Web Design section (below,) because it will further inform you on some Ease of Use notes.

Web Design:

The web design for the dashboard is on the brink of excellence. But it’s not there yet. Below are some quick Pros and Cons to give you an idea of what to expect.

Pros

• The interface is just the right amount of graphical without being cutesy or distracting.
• Some forethought has been put into making the most frequently used functions easy to access.
• There are ever-present tools in the left sidebar, the main viewing area, a preview section, and internal tools that occupy the right sidebar. Very easy to quickly get the information you need.
• The UX has a distinct MS Windows vibe, if you’re into that. Windows users will feel at home.

Cons

• Frames and sizing did not adjust to mobile devices. At all.
• Rather than have two rows of tools, there are often places with only one long row, and pagination arrows to navigate through the list.
• The aforementioned Windows vibe.
• Without global nav buttons, it can be difficult to backtrack.
• After you are a few links deep in resolving a ticket, it’s not easy to get back, clicking on what I thought was intuitive to get me back to the top level sometimes worked, and other times brought me back to the last page I was on. Which sounds like a poorly implemented feature.

Customer Service and Technical Support:

Many users report being impressed with the TeamSupport customer service. After my own tests of their responsiveness and thoroughness, I have to agree. While I was less than pleased with the answer I received, the reply was very quick, and offered several options for me to try to correct the problem.

The best ways to get in touch with TeamSupport are as follows:

• Knowledge Base
• Instruction Manual
• Submit your own ticket

Once you have signed up with an account (either a Free Trial or full Paid Account) there are email and phone numbers for direct contact with their Support Staff. These will be provided to you in your introductory email from TeamSupport

If you’re having trouble connecting to the TeamSupport service, you can check their current status here.

Negative Reviews and Complaints:

No piece of software is going to be a perfect fit for everyone. It’s expected to find the occasional dissatisfied user who leaves a negative review, and many of those reviews can be dismissed on the grounds of “Probable User Error.” So when I find valuable and intelligent criticism, I pay very close attention. These excerpts clued me in to some legitimate concerns, which I was able to corroborate through my own testing of the software:

• “I’d give it higher marks if I didn’t have to ‘tweak’ so many processes. For example, I often have to log out/log back in to see changes made. Also, I have to remove a customer from a ticket, view the customer, and then reattach the customer to see changes made to a customer profile.”

It is also commonly reported that too much emphasis has been placed on the Search and Filter features, making them more complicated than they should be. Those features may be powerful, but it has been at the expense of their Ease of Use:

• “The system needs only one way to search rather than three ways or more.”
• “The reporting, offhand, seems to be a bit more limited than I would like and is not as straightforward as possible. A more user-friendly means of reporting would be welcomed.”

Positive Reviews and Testimonials:

One of the most common praises for TeamSupport was for their excellent customer service. To be more specific, when a user has interacted with Customer Support, it has been a positive experience, but the rarity of needing to contact them has been the true benefit. TeamSupport is also commended for its rich feature set, with many users saying that it has met their needs for years, and they are still discovering untapped features.

• “TeamSupport is always adding new features and upgrades to their platform without charging more for the new additions. The cost is reasonable, and their support team is top of the line. Any time we have a concern or even a suggestion, their development team is there to respond and help.”
• “I think the product and the vendor are amazing. It rarely ever goes down, and if it does, it’s very brief. This is one of the best of its kind. I really like using it; it works smoothly, and it has a very clean look and feel.”
• “I like that it can be accessed from anywhere and doesn’t restrict me to just one system. Its tabular interface makes it easy to access information. Also, I like that TeamSupport makes an effort to actually implement features if we request them; I have experienced it first hand. It’s easy to use.”

Security:

TeamSupport has implemented a feature that dual-tasks as a security measure: Live Lookup. Rather than maintain their own database of your client’s information, it uses Live Lookup to pull customer data from your CRM of choice, in real time. This ‘open library’ approach means one fewer link in the data chain, and one fewer point of vulnerability. Your profiles have only one administrator- your CRM. No syncing, no multiple programs vying for admin privileges, and no reliance on another web host to secure your data.

For more information on the security they provide, check out this page on their website.

Final Verdict:

TeamSupport occupies both ends of a wide spectrum. There are those features and functions that make you ask “How did I ever live without this?” And there are those drawbacks that make you clench you jaw. Too much of their website is abominably written, and the instructional videos hinder more than help.

To be fair, there were several instances when I expected to sideline a feature, but eventually learned to see the value in it. Examples include the Water Cooler and the flagging system.

At first, I thought the Flagging System was a needless feature; just an easy way to add another bullet point to their list of features. But the more I experimented with the software, I began to find many uses for it. For example, it would make it easy to flag tickets that pertain to specific products that you know need more urgent responses, or less urgent ones (such as a product being beta tested.) Or, you could use keywords to flag tickets that are likely coming from customers whom you are at risk of losing. The system will search your tickets for the specified keywords, and channel them to an agent trained to handle those specific interactions.

Likewise, the Water Cooler seemed like a waste of screen real estate. But in a more imaginative analysis, I realized that a larger company with many products and specialized staff could come to rely on this internal chat system. A newly hired CSR could post a customer issue, and get a quick answer fired back from more experienced employees, for instance.

This was how a lot of my evaluation went. Lots of highs, lots of lows, but in general it settled out to a relatively positive experience. In hindsight, this coincides with many of the user reviews that I read before I tested TeamSupport for myself. Most users are quite satisfied, giving TeamSupport an overall score two steps above average. Yet many users had some sobering criticism as well. Our final Merchant Maverick score is 3.5 out of 5 stars.

If you’re ready to give TeamSupport a try, you can begin your demo here.

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