Automating Customer Service: Streamlining Account Changes and DevOps

Streamlining the Process to Make Account Changes with FreshDesk, Trello, and More

At Workato, FreshDesk is the ticketing system that customers use to submit support tickets however, Trello is used by the accounts management team to track account-related tasks and their statuses. For example, when a customer wants to upgrade their account or needs a refund, a new Trello card marks this task. We needed a way to notify the accounts team of account-related tickets raised by users without having Customer Success agents notifying them manually and individually. After the issue has been processed, the Account Management Team also needs to respond to the ticket in Freshdesk to inform the customer about the changes, or if they have any clarification. As the company grew and we acquired more customers, we realized there was no way to notify the account team of any accounts-related requests by customers promptly and automatically. There was also no easy, out of the box integration between FreshDesk Tickets and Trello.

To solve this pain point, we created some custom fields and Workato recipes to make account changes seamless. First, the Customer Success agent triages FreshDesk tickets and if the ticket is accounts-related, they select a “Send to Trello” (Custom Ticket Field in Freshdesk) option with key instructions (Custom Ticket field in Freshdesk) for the accounts management team. This recipe picks up the ticket information and creates a Trello card with a standard template for the accounts management team. The card contains key information from Intercom and Freshdesk, like the key instructions from the Customer Success agent. After the card is created, a notification is created in the accounts management Slack channel to notify them of the new task.

The Trello card created by the ticket will automatically contain key information about the user so that the account management team does not need to hunt for the relevant data required to process the changes. Additionally, there are direct links from the Trello Card to the Freshdesk ticket.

The result is a much clearer handover process from Customer Success to Accounts Management teams, with about 20 minutes saved per accounts-related request. This is a huge productivity boost. Since Trello cards and notifications are automatically created with relevant information, Accounts Management agents can immediately handle the requests without having to refer to different apps for information. This leaves Workato free to continue growing in size as the entire process is automated.

Related: 4 examples for implementing an automated ticketing system

Support and engineering synchronization

Requesting Product Enhancements from Development with FreshDesk and Github

When a customer reports a bug or submits an enhancement request through our support portal, an issue has to be raised to the development team for them to build out the enhancement or fix the issue. The Development team tracks issues and requests through Github while FreshDesk is used as the main customer facing ticketing system. Without integration, there is simply no easy way to create a Github Issue without leaving FreshDesk and logging into Github, which slows the CS team down.

As a quick fix, we set up a pre-built integration between FreshDesk and Github. Inside FreshDesk, Agents can create an issue in Github with a click of a button to send the information to the Engineering/Product team. The Github issue then gets assigned to a development team member, who uses the FreshDesk Ticket to communicate directly with the customer.

However, this pre-built solution does not allow us to:

• See customer information in Github
  The plan details of the customer and priority status of important customers do not go through using the pre-built integration.

• Selectively send comments from FreshDesk to Github

• Send Notifications
  Whenever someone is assigned to the issue on Github, FreshDesk does not get a notification of the assignment, and there are no notifications sent to the ticket owner.
• Have comments from Github reopen FreshDesk tickets
  When the development team has questions for the user who reported the issue, the ticket does not get reopened and the Customer Success team does not know about the request.
• Control for duplicates before creating Github issues

Managing Requests for Services with FreshDesk and JIRA

Workato offers services such as professional services or the free 1 hour quick-start calls where a customer can work with a Workato expert to build recipes and design automations. When a customer requests services, the request comes in through FreshDesk and the Customer Success team has to inform the services team. The services team uses JIRA to manage requests and so we needed a comprehensive way to sync up FreshDesk and JIRA.

To try and make it easy for customer success reps to alert the services team of a new request, we used a pre-built integration between Freshdesk and JIRA. Inside FreshDesk, Agents can simply create an issue in JIRA with a click of a button. The JIRA issue get assigned to a Services Personnel, who uses the Freshdesk Ticket to communicate with the customer. Unfortunately, this we soon found that this pre-built integration isn’t completely comprehensive.