During ONTRApalooza 2013, our annual business conference, I presented “What ONTRAPORT Has Learned from 100,000 Support Tickets.” Three years later we’ve more than doubled that number, and the lessons learned continue.
ONTRAPORT’s mission is to reduce the burden of technology; the role of the ONTRAPORT Customer Support team is to efficiently and efficaciously get customers set-up and started and to be there along the way as their business flourishes.
But it’s no easy task building a responsive and well-loved Customer Support team in a new industry while undergoing massive growth, launching new products, and updating legacy products. Yet, we wouldn’t exchange the experiences, interactions, and clients for the world.
It All Started in a Yurt
We didn’t start as an industry-leading Customer Support team. We were a ragtag team of dedicated agents working from our homes, in garages, and in a yurt. We grew up and leased a co-sharing office space then finally found our “home” in our current campus. Yet, through the years, no matter the physical location of our headquarters, our focus hasn’t wavered.
The first support rep for ONTRAPORT was, as it is in many software startups, the CEO. Landon Ray, ONTRAPORT’s founder and CEO, and Pin Chen, co-founder and CTO, fielded calls and answered customers questions daily.
Imagine having a direct line to ONTRAPORT’s visionary and first engineer! But both realized that the process wasn’t scalable. We transitioned from Landon and Pin to ZenDesk, a startup specializing in help desk solutions. This freed Landon and Pin to focus on the product and market. Little did we know at the time that organizing client requests into a central repository set up ONTRAPORT to create the experience and platform that we have today.
Ten Years Later
Now, eight years after moving to a unified help desk solution, we’ve been able to make significant advancements in supporting and anticipating our customers’ questions. We see where in-app queries arise and feed that to the CEO and product team. We notice the features our successful customers are using and create training and in-app projects around how to implement those in your business. It’s our intention to make using the app is as frictionless as possible while always being a chat away.
“Lance was awesome as always. Thanks.”
-Bryan Skavnak, The Happiest Golfer
With our expanding hours, commitment to hiring in Santa Barbara, extensive new hire training and expansion to new regions, such as Asia Pacific, we’ve been here for ten years and holding steady.
Now, we’re a 20+ strong global Support department that has learned much about our clients’ hopes, dreams, and businesses. Through countless conversations and chats, we’ve honed our efforts and training around delivering answers to questions that let our customers get back to working on their business rather than in it.
“Kelsey is awesome. She was patient, had a good grasp of the program and was able to answer all my questions. She followed up with me by sending an e-mail with links to discussion points we touched on during our call. I found her voice to be quite pleasing to the ear. My experience with ONTRAPORT since day one has been exceptional. I am so glad I didn’t sign with your well-known competitor. Don’t grow out of what makes your company exceptional. Customer service and a powerful program makes my life as a startup a little bit easier.”
-Patrick LeClaire, New Life Tax Resolution
ONTRAPORT prides itself on its customer support. We believe it is one of the key differentiators we possess in our mission to support entrepreneurs. Whether it is extra support hours to cover our global client base or extensive internal training programs, we invest in both support and client success. More than attending to customer requests, we actively sift through your questions plucking out feedback gems that help us improve both the product and our ability to assist our clients in their business and keep them focused on their passions.
We [Heart] our Customers
Much is said about analyzing customer interactions and crafting the perfect customer journey. We like to think the ONTRAPORT Customer Support team is on this journey with our clients. We’ve shared both the growing pains and the wild successes of our clients first hand. We rejoice in a successful launch and advocate with product based on your feedback. We regularly share our clients’ stories of how they use ONTRAPORT in innovative ways. Many of us have met you first hand and even more of you have spoken kind words about our team. Even if we haven’t met you, we’ve been here the whole time.
Here’s to another ten years!
