Fed Up with Support Team Bottlenecks? Gain Automation Insights from Albato team!
When we ask our users why they chose Albato, among other benefits, almost everyone mentions the excellent work of our support team. And it’s not without reason — our team is proficient in handling complex use cases and configuration settings. As a result, our support department processes are well-organized with no chaos or constant switching between thousands of windows, despite the fact that a lot of information comes to support that is needed by sales, product, and development teams.
So, how can you structure your support department’s work to keep both your customers satisfied and your support team from being overwhelmed? The key is automation. My name is Diana Pogodina, I’m Head of Support, and I want to share how support work is organized at Albato.
How It All Works at Albato
Support, like any other department, often suffers from the need to “navigate” through multiple services — live chat with users, corporate messengers, CRMs, phone systems, social media chats where customers can ask questions, and so on.
Our entire system is designed to concentrate the work of each team member in 2–3 services, while still being able to quickly respond to every inquiry and exchange information with other departments.
All Customer Chats Automatically Transferred to CRM System
The main part of our work is done in Intercom. After closing a chat with a customer in Intercom, we automatically transfer the chat to our CRM. Since there was no direct integration between Intercom and HubSpot(in our case), we set up the chat data transfer through Albato.
Here’s how the workflow looks like: after the dialogue is completed, the data is collected in a note and transferred to the corresponding contact in HubSpot .
Quickly Involving Other Departments In Customer Support
Sometimes, during communication with a customer, our support team members realize that the customer needs to be “transferred” to the sales department or to an account manager. In such cases, they don’t need to exit out of Intercom and message their colleagues in a separate service — they simply add the relevant tag within Intercom. We have set up automation through Albato, where when a tag is added, the sales or accounts team immediately receives a notification in Slack and can continue working with the customer right away.
This approach allows us to achieve multiple goals at once: we don’t delay the resolution of the customer’s request, quickly closing all inquiries. It also saves time for our support team: instead of multiple actions, they just need to add one tag.
This is how it’s set up with us: we receive data from Intercom via a webhook when a tag is added, transfer that data to our CRM, and send a message to Slack.
With this setup, we can pass any parameters that can be captured by the webhook — customer name, phone number, email, etc. We can also add static text, for example, to note that the customer’s request involves a large and urgent integration, and should be prioritized.
This way, we establish seamless communication between departments, where no one wastes time on unnecessary actions — as a result, all customer inquiries are resolved promptly.
In addition, our customers have the option to schedule a video call with a manager for activities such as a demo setup. The process is as follows: the technical support team sends the customer a link to Google Calendar through Intercom, and the customer schedules the appointment there. We have also set up notifications in Slack for the manager about new video calls from the Google Calendar.
All Customer Communication From Different Segments In One Channel
Since we have both B2C and White-Label segments, our technical support team may not always be able to assist with the latter. Sometimes, customers may need to communicate with a project manager, for example. To avoid creating multiple chats, we have also implemented this through Intercom. For example, White-Label customers can write in the Intercom chat for both support and leave a message for the project manager. This message will automatically appear in the Slack channel assigned to the project.
All our notifications are linked to Slack because it is our main communication channel. All team members can quickly see notifications in the appropriate channel, and from there, we can set up automated task creation based on incoming notifications or any other options that are convenient for the team.
Swift Resolution of Dialogues With Low Ratings
Although rare, there are instances where a customer may give a low rating after a conversation with a manager for various reasons. This situation is also addressed by our system. If a conversation in Intercom receives a low rating (e.g. 2 out of 5), I [head of the support department] receive a notification in Telegram about such dialogue. Then I can promptly intervene and help resolve the customer’s issue. This approach ensures that negative feedback from customers does not accumulate, and as a result, we have significantly reduced the number of low ratings.
The integration is quite straightforward — a webhook captures the ratings of all dialogues in Intercom, and this data is recorded in a Google Sheet for reporting purposes. Then there is a filter: if the rating is above 2, the integration stops working, but if it is below 2, a notification with the relevant dialogue data is sent to Telegram.
Balancing the Workload of Managers
At Albato, our customers have the option to submit various requests directly on our website, such as paid setup of bundles with a specialist. These requests come to our corporate email, and we automatically transfer them to Slack using Albato, setting up the distribution of requests among managers using the round-robin assignment tool.
This helps us minimize the number of services our team has to work with and eliminates the need to constantly track who should handle a customer, as the manager is automatically assigned.
Reporting
The standard report from Intercom doesn’t provide us with all the data we need for analytics. So we gather the data in a Google Sheet from Intercom and our CRM, where we pull in user’s tariff plan data, for example.
For monitoring the performance of our department, we currently find Google Sheets sufficient, and we don’t use complex BI systems. But regardless of the service we use, Albato helps us solve the task of collecting all the data in one place for analysis.
Want to learn more about automations for other teams such as Product, Marketing, Sales, and Development? We share expert tips and a guide with ready-to-use solutions on our Medium blog: Free Yourself from Task Management Slavery with Task Automation
