With 7 consumer apps and over 100M downloads, Readdle’s customer support team has plenty of work on their hands. Last year alone, we answered over 130,000 emails from our users.
Customer support isn’t just about troubleshooting and resolving issues. In fact, our users and we are always helping each other. Every day we get valuable feedback from customers and do our best to understand their problems. We know what people want and what they ask for and this helps us constantly improve our products.
It is crucial for the support team to share user insights with the product and development teams so they can analyze the feedback and make better product decisions. With the variety of apps and services we use for communication, we had to find the best one for this task.
At first, we used Slack to share user feedback with the product people. Slack is great for chatting and discussing things, but the teammates often missed important information as it was quickly buried under the clutter of other messages.
Next, we decided to try using email. Emails are harder to miss than messages in Slack channels, but there was another problem. The response rates were pretty low. People were just reading emails but usually didn’t reply to them. Email didn’t seem like the right place for a discussion.
Later, Readdle introduced Spark for Teams which helped companies better collaborate around email. Over the last year, it’s also become an indispensable tool for our support team. Spark brings important emails to the top of your inbox and at the same time, it makes it easy to start a conversation and quickly discuss an email in comments. We’d like to share our best practices here in using Spark as a support team.
1. Discuss User Feedback
Our support team receives lots of comments, ideas, and suggestions from users. Support specialists gather and highlight the most interesting feedback and email it to our developers and product managers. But wait. There’s a difference between Spark and other email apps.
As all the recipients belong to the same team in Spark, they can easily discuss the email in comments below the thread. It takes less time and effort to type a short comment under the thread rather than answer a traditional email using the Reply All button. Shared threads help our team quickly discuss things without polluting each other's inboxes with more emails.
2. Share Feature Requests
There are a lot of requests from our users: From the ability to change email font to releasing Spark for Windows. The support team adds every vote for new features or improvements to our feature manager. When there’s a high enough demand for a particular feature, the rest of the team needs to know it.
“I usually write how many people asked for a particular feature, describe their workflows, include their quotes, and ask our team what they think about it. I also add links to the Helpspot tickets with feature requests to provide more context,” says Alexandra Pashel, Head of Support at Readdle.
3. Draft Weekly Reports Together
For each of our products, the support team creates a weekly report with the main user feedback, feature requests, and the most common issues. This helps product managers, designers, and developers see the whole picture and learn how our users perceive the product. Such reports are especially important for beta versions with new features as the team can see if people like the updates and make the necessary changes prior to a release.
Usually, one person writes an email while others collaborate on it in real time using the shared drafts in Spark. This works just like Google Docs right in the email composer. Multiple people can simultaneously paste quotes from users, format text, and add links to support tickets.
The team also uses the private comments feature in Spark to discuss what to include to the report and how to structure it. This is more convenient than discussing the email in Slack because everyone can instantly see both the draft and discussion around it in the same window, saving them the trouble of toggling between multiple apps.
For simple reports, our team uses email templates in Spark. After drafting the perfect email, you can save it as a template and reuse it anytime you need it. Spark lets you add placeholders for numbers, names, or any other information that changes every time you send an email.
At the forefront of our communication with customers, Readdle’s support team gathers a lot of feedback and shares it across the company. These are insights, ideas, and suggestions from our users that help us build great products to make people even more productive.
Spark turned out to be a great tool for sharing user feedback with product and development teams. It lets teammates quickly discuss emails in the comments and even draft important messages together. We hope our best practices will be useful to your team.
Download Spark for your team for free and let us know what you think!
Maria Henyk 
