An inside look at how our support team uses Basecamp 3.
The Basecamp support team is a fully remote team that spans seven time zones and helps our customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s tough to get everyone on a team on the same page. It can be even harder to keep them there.
That’s why our team uses Basecamp 3 to stay organized. The tools inside our team space ensures that everyone has answers to questions like “Who’s taking care of Twitter replies right now?”, “What are the common cases we’ve seen this week?” or “Where’s the outline for our online classes?”
We’ve talked before about how we use Basecamp 3 to organize our meetups and run our podcast. This time, let’s dive into how our customer support team works.
Let’s all chat.
With our team entirely remote, it helps to have a place to chat in real time. A virtual water-cooler if you will. Enter Campfire.
Campfire gives us a place to talk instantly about anything that we need to. It’s where we go to ask others about a particularly interesting customer email. Or share the latest Taylor Swift music video. We’ve even had some fun GIF battles there. As shifts come online and then leave at the end of the day, you’ll also see lots of hello’s and goodbye’s said. It’s a powerful tool for making sure that your team feels connected, even if they are on the other side of the planet.
Default away from the never-ending conveyor belt.
While Campfire is great for those real time chats, it’s not designed to be an all-day meeting. For updates and other messages that the entire team need to see, we use the Message Board. We also use it for conversations that need some time to happen, like this one.
Instead of that message being lost in the never-ending conveyor belt of a chat, it’s right there on the Message Board. The conversation happens through comments with plenty of time for each person to think about their answer.
Create space with the Schedule.
For any events related to the team, those go on our Schedule. It can be things like customer trainings or calls, our regular 1:1s, and times that we’ll be out for vacations or other days off.
We also schedule in time to work on side projects or anything else that takes us out of our email queue. By putting it on the Schedule, we create space for each of us. Without that space, your team will end up as queue monkeys trying to get through just one more email.
One less status meeting to attend.
Status meetings are the worst. Thankfully we don’t have them with our team because of check-ins.
With the Automatic Check-in tool, we ask everyone on the team a few things on a regular schedule. The check-in allows us to talk about questions like “What was a common issue that you saw this week?” without needing to hold a weekly team meeting.
All of your resources in one place.
Our Docs and Files tool sees a lot of use. It’s our go-to place for our files, the online class resources, our customer ideas, and anything else our team might need. Everything’s organized by topics using the folder option. And a few of those folders even have Readme docs in it to give a person the gist of what that folder is for.
One of my favorite folders in here is the Happy File, an idea we stole from the team over at Automattic. It’s a place to share the love that customers have for Basecamp — the team and the product. Here’s Jeremey Duvall on how it works:
Every Happiness Engineer is encouraged to create a happy file just for them. In that file, they keep amazing [customer] interactions… When they feel down during the day, looking through the file is a quick way to pick themselves back up.
Instead of it being an individual file, we’re trying it out as a team file. Whenever someone has something to share, they start a new doc and put the comment, email, Tweet, or whatever it is there.
It’s in Basecamp.
Remember those questions where we started? It’s a simple answer now — it’s in Basecamp! One place to check who’s handling Twitter replies, what common cases we’ve seen this week, and where that class outline is. It’s our central source of truth for everyone on the team.
If you have any questions about how our team works or want more details on anything above, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer!
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Finding it tough to keep your support team (or any other team) on the same page? Give Basecamp 3 a shot. It’s a free 30-day trial. Teams simply run better on Basecamp.
