®
community-driven customer service
Infusionsoft retools for growth
Benefits from Helpstream
◆ 50% reduction in case volume
◆ 54% self service incident resolution
◆ 30% self service resolution via
community-based service
◆ Accelerated incident resolution
and significantly improved
customer satisfaction
◆ Better insight into customer
utilization of Infusionsoft products
and improved cross sell / up sell
◆ Improved knowledge base
currency and completeness
◆ Faster dissemination of expert
knowledge and time to CSR
proficiency
◆ Decreased systems management
costs related to decommissioned
systems
H E L P S T R E A M
For Infusionsoft, providing small businesses with innovative strategies for
growth isn’t just about developing great marketing automation software –
it’s about an unrelenting commitment to provide truly exceptional
customer service. As their recent top 10 ranking in revenue growth
on Software Magazine’s Software 500 list illustrates, their commitment
to creating great customer success stories is beginning to pay off.
For Infusionsoft, headquartered outside of Phoenix, Arizona, improving their
customers’ sales conversion rates and helping them drive repeat business has
always been a key focus. Their products have come to represent ease of use and
affordability, particularly for companies with between 1 and 25 employees.
But, even more importantly, maintaining the Infusionsoft brand and enabling
entrepreneurs to create personalized marketing and sales communications has
become integral to the success of many of their customers’ growth strategies.
It’s no wonder that 20% of Infusionsoft customers doubled their sales in the
last year alone.
Key Challenge
Manage Growth While Providing Exceptional Customer Service
In 2008, Infusionsoft’s rapid growth posed significant challenges. They had
always provided customers unlimited, friendly telephone support. The problem
now became a pressing need to be more efficient in delivering services to a
larger and more diverse customer base.
For example, agents had access to a popular knowledge management tool, but
agent-assisted support processes could not scale fast enough to accommodate
increased demands. A standalone customer forum also provided tantalizing
promise. It enabled customers to interact and get answers to questions, but as
the number of users increased discussion threads became long and branched
to multiple topics. Users needed to read through multiple pages to get to the
best answer to their question, and they began to rely on calling agents to get
quick answers.
The customer case tracking system itself was homegrown and not integrated
with either the forum or the knowledge base. The result – proliferation of
manual activities across multiple support processes required to log cases,
research and communicate solutions, and maintain the knowledge base.
Before long, it became obvious that to support their business growth, customer
support would need to be completely reengineered. So would supporting
processes across multiple departments including sales, marketing, finance,
product management, and product development.
C A S E S T U D Y
The Solution
Community-Driven Customer Service
The customer service team needed a way to increase agent
productivity. They wanted to give customers easy access to
knowledge base articles, get customers helping other cus-
tomers and contribute their own solutions to the knowledge
base, and free up agents from routine requests enabling them
to focus on tough problems and relationship building. They
also felt that building a vibrant Web-based community
offered significant promise to provide greater insight into the
customer experience and how they were using Infusionsoft’s
products. This would enable service agents to fine tune their
efforts and provide exceptional customer service.
After evaluating multiple approaches and technologies includ-
ing wikis, forums, and traditional customer relationship
management systems, Infusionsoft selected Helpstream’s
community-driven customer service solution. Helpstream’s
integrated community, knowledge base, case management
and self-service portal provided an exact match to their needs.
Best of all, Helpstream’s Software-as-a-Service design provided
Infusionsoft compelling low total cost of ownership benefits.
Helpstream
Easy to Use and Deploy
After an approximately 8 week deployment, Infusionsoft
configured Helpstream for guest and registered user access
behind the Support tab of their website. Infusionsoft cus-
tomers who clicked the help tab in their software application
received immediate access to Helpstream’s self-service portal,
branded with the Infusionsoft logo and color palette.
Infusionsoft configured Helpstream’s advanced permission
controls to provide customers access to authorized content.
The Infusionsoft portal lets customers search across their knowledge
base, ask questions, and submit cases for agent assisted resolution.
The Infusionsoft knowledge base provides classified content to both agents
and customers, and it allows contributions from all community members.
Helpstream, Inc | 2001 Landings Drive | Mountain View, CA 94043 | Phone: 650.605.6800 | sales@helpstream.com | www.helpstream.com
©2009 Helpstream, Inc. Helpstream is a U.S. Registered Service Mark of Helpstream, Inc.
“Helpstream allows us to keep our support organization lean,
H E L P S T R E A M
while at the same time enabling us to provide outstanding service
and support to our customers.The features and ease of use
empowers our customers to discover answers to questions on
their own through the rich content provided, which frees my
team up for critical support issues. Using Helpstream has cut our
tickets in half and increased customer satisfaction tremendously.”
Joanne Ravielli
Vice President Customer Service and Support of Infusionsoft
C A S E
They enabled customers to search for information, ask and
answer questions, comment or vote on content submitted by
other users, and launch a case to customer support if they
needed additional help. Portal users could now establish and
S T U DY
publish their personal profile to highlight their background
and subject areas of expertise.
Behind the scenes, Infusionsoft deployed extensive process
workflows, using an assortment of queues, custom fields,
business rules, escalations and tailored email templates,
structuring prioritized support processes to fit their needs.
Simple requests like password reset now get automatically
resolved and more complex problems are routed to agents
with appropriate training and expertise.
Because continuous service innovation is critical, Infusionsoft
actively monitors search traffic on the portal – identifying
what information customers find most and least useful, and
what is missing. Valuable customer comments are easily incor-
porated into solution articles and the knowledge base is con-
tinuously enhanced by converting appropriate Q&A threads
and case histories into reusable, searchable solution articles.
Benefits
Rapid Return on Investment
Customer response to Infusionsoft’s new self service portal
has been overwhelmingly positive. Because customers can
get quick answers to questions via Helpstream’s integrated
community and knowledge base, self service is becoming a
customer preferred channel. Agent workload is decreasing
and overall job satisfaction across the customer service team
is on target with management objectives.
Helpstream’s tight integration of knowledge base, customer
support, and community processes is also delivering com-
pelling strategic benefits. As their business continues to grow,
it is providing them critical insights into customer behavior
and perceptions of their products. This helps identify oppor-
tunities for cross- and up-selling and focuses the entire organi-
zation on becoming even more responsive to customer needs.
Perhaps best of all, Infusionsoft has been able to raise the bar
in customer service and continue to deliver a differentiating
level of service at a total cost of ownership far below what
competing solutions would have been able to provide.
As a result, when customers retain their relationship with
Infusionsoft and add more products, the profitability of
their customer service team is increasing over time.