At Splashtop, excellent customer support isn’t an aspiration, it’s a core value. The glowing reviews Splashtop receives are evidence of this. In G2’s Fall 2021 Remote Desktop Grid Report, Splashtop came out on top in several customer satisfaction categories including a G2 Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 94 and the highest “quality of support” score. This isn’t a one-off achievement; the entire company has been committed to excellence in customer service from the start.
“Continuous feedback from our customers, along with the chance to do something about it, gets me and my colleagues out of bed every morning. It’s a cliché, but our jobs feel like more than a paycheck because we’re making our customers’ lives easier. We feel a profound sense of pride and fulfillment because of our connections with our customers.” Splashtop’s Co-Founder and CTO, Phil Sheu
Stephen Ng, Director of Global Technical Support and Customer Success, embodies Splashtop’s customer-centric culture. Gillian Miller, Splashtop’s Content Manager, sat down with him to discuss what his team does to achieve best-in-class customer support and how they’ll continue to do so as Splashtop grows.
Gillian: Your job title, Head of Global Technical Support and Customer Success, indicates that you're a very busy man. Could you expand on the different teams and functions that you supervise?
Stephen: I wear a couple of hats. First, I work with the support team which is focused on both the customer and service before, during and after purchase. We deal with everything from provisioning licenses or resolving issues, to questions about product features.
My other hat is the customer success side of it. This is a newer function in Splashtop. As in the SaaS market, the Account Manager role has become that of a Customer Success Manager. It’s about changing and building a culture around delighting the customer. How do we work with our customer to ensure their goals are being met using Splashtop? How do we get them to a point of utilizing our software to its full potential?
Gillian: You’ve got a full plate. How many people are on the Customer Support team and where are you based?
Stephen: Our teams are based at the head office in San Jose, California and in Taipei, Taiwan. A majority of our customer base is still domestic, where we're strictly English speaking for written support. My Taipei team supports the rest of world. They’re a talented, multi-lingual team.
This past year, our team grew from 10 Support Engineers in the San Jose and Taipei offices combined, to a team of 13 in San Jose, and 14 in Taipei. We’ve seen a lot of growth through the pandemic.
Gillian: Could you take us through your typical support workflow? Right from when a customer has an issue to resolution.
Stephen: We’re proud to say we have a one-touch closure rate of about 80-85%. Our workflow is 24/5, so as customers come in through chat, it’s a fairly seamless process. Customers can also reach us by phone, via our 408 number, or submit a ticket on our website. We’ve started to integrate AI for self-help as well. Customers can start typing their request and our AI will go through our database and provide them with suggestions on related articles and links to our FAQs.
The workflow for chat interactions:
Our chat support team works with the customer to identify the issue. Usually, they resolve it on the first touch.
It takes an average chat interaction between 10 to 12 messages to resolve the issue. That's a pretty good batting average.
We’re integrated with Jira, so if there’s an escalation (i.e. It's a bug, or additional information is needed) we can notify the Dev team in Taipei.
The Dev team then notifies the support engineer that they’ve found a resolution, or that there’s a scheduled fix coming up in a later release.
The engineer creates a support ticket and contacts the customer to notify them of the case status.
The workflow for phone calls through our 408 number:
Notify customers that the call is monitored for quality purposes.
Verify the customer and work with them to resolve the issue.
Use our product, Splashtop, to log into the customer's desktop—with their permission—and resolve their issue while on the phone with them.
Close the ticket.
The workflow for website tickets:
Customers log into our website and submit an inquiry to support, and a ticket is created.
We route those tickets on an on-going basis to our support teams.
“Splashtop has been of great help now that we have most of our staff working remotely. We have not had any issues with it!! I had some questions at the beginning about the installation process and pricing for a group and the customer services representatives we spoke to were excellent, very quick, and helpful!” - G2 Review from Administrator in Financial Services
Gillian: Adding to this, what tools do you and your support team use?
Stephen: Well, for our support, we pretty much use a single tool, Zendesk, as our CRM. We’ve integrated all of our software into Zendesk. It’s connected to our phone system, Splashtop SOS, and JIRA.
Gillian: Today's customer needs omni channel service. What are your thoughts? How does your team aspire to deliver this to customers?
Stephen: As we grow, we’re focusing on having a dedicated team that handles the phones and chat. We want to get to a point where everyone can seamlessly pick up any of the different channels that come in. We’re not there yet.
Currently, we’re able to use Splashtop to remote into any customer, on any device and walk them through their issue. Technology allows us to be a lot closer to the customer.
Gillian: Can you describe the SLAs, response times, and customer satisfaction goals you’ve set for the team?
Stephen: To continue to provide excellent service, we measure customer satisfaction in a few different ways:
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) of 90% or better—Today, it's at about 93%.
Capterra Overall User Rating —We’re currently at an overall rating of 97 from user reviews.
Customer Effort Score (CES) — Something I introduced to measure how easy onboarding is for a customer. On a scale of 1-5 (1 being very hard to 5 being very easy), we're at 4.4.
A lot of the customer feedback we get is around Splashtop being easy to install, easy to use, etc. Within minutes customers are up and running. That feedback has helped us get to where we are.
“I just wanted to send my appreciation to you and your wonderful support team for getting us sorted out with Splashtop… everyone at Splashtop has been excellent in guiding me through the setup of the system! I have to say that the customer support for this product is the best I have ever experienced.” — Rick Campion, Technical Operations Manager, Music Department at Goldsmiths University of London
Gillian: You’ve mentioned your team's growth during the pandemic. As Splashtop continues to grow, how do you plan to scale your team?
Stephen: Traditionally, our support organization has been in-house with coverage only from San Jose and Taipei. As we grow, there is a time gap that we need to start to fill in our Amsterdam, EMEA office. Long term the goal is to start to house a team in our Amsterdam office for our customer base in that region. The challenge there is, how do we do multi language support? So, there is a pathway and a strategy that I'm looking at to start to build out teams in those regions.
As we’re growing, our customers’ needs are changing. Our Enterprise customers have support requirements 24/7, 365 days a year. Time is of the essence. Our next goal is to expand into a two-tier organization globally.
Gillian: It will be exciting to see those changes take shape. I’ve got one final question to wrap up our conversation. Splashtop customers currently rave about customer service, what's the secret?
Stephen: It's always about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. It's not only going above and beyond, but understanding the customer. Basically, I ask “how would I like to be serviced?” Personally, I'm a pretty demanding consumer. I’d probably be a customer service and tech support agent’s worst nightmare. I want everything, and I want it now. By the same token, if I want to ask for and demand that, I need to require that level of service from myself and my team. In order to achieve this, we’re always approaching things from a customers’ point of view, versus an us-against-them mentality. That mindset is key to our team delivering the best service possible. I’m excited about where we are and where we’re heading.
“Splashtop’s customer service team has been absolutely divine! Their kind words and actions have cemented Splashtop as our remote access software of choice. Bravo to you all!” - Jake Harrelson, Network Administrator, Home Family Medicine
