Assistly – Consolidated Customer Support

Customers that can’t understand how a website works are unlikely to ever visit in the future, which is why customer service and support applications are so important for any business that maintains a presence online. Assistly is an interesting new customer support web-app that can help businesses manage requests and deliver accurate responses to their online shoppers, clients, and customers in record time.

Assistly is an all-in-one tool, which means you can get everyone at your company involved in customer support by signing up for the service. Within hours of signing up for a company account, you and your staffers can begin fielding questions from online shoppers or website visitors within the system rather than through email and phone calls alone. Build a support page to reflect the questions that are asked most frequently by your customers. You can include a series of FAQs and Q&As for people to check out, or add contact forms with live chat capabilities. By adding self-service features, you can reduce the workload on employees who frequently answer the same questions from customers while also increasing client satisfaction. Because Assistly is a collaborative application, you can set up logins for each of your employees and encourage remote workers to pitch in and answer customer queries related to their areas of expertise.

In addition to its basic features, Assistly also offers an array of “premium” tools, such as multi-channel support – which pulls customer queries from Twitter, Facebook, and email into one central spot – shared knowledge bases for employees, complete customer histories, and special “QuickCodes” that can help decrease the time that employees spend on each customer interaction. Although Assistly is not the first cloud-based customer service application to launch, its ease-of-use does help it stand out from the pack.

Practical Uses:

• Create an FAQ page where customers can find answers to their questions
• Provide answers to questions that customers ask on Facebook or Twitter
• Encourage remote workers to answer questions from clients about their area of expertise
• Spend less time solving client problems and more time working on new products

Insider Tips:

• Upgrade to a premium account to access the multi-channel support features
• Use “QuickCodes” to decrease the time you spend on each interaction
• Create client profiles with a history of each previous interaction and resolution
• Businesses can connect to their corporate databases through Assistly

What we liked:

• Assistly is set up in a way that is very intuitive and easy to understand
• Businesses can import data from SalesForce, Google Apps and other systems into Assistly
• Analytics tools help companies gauge how well their customer service teams are working
• Companies that set up their own FAQ pages will experience a decreased customer queries

What we didn’t like:

• Nothing

Alternatives:

• Freshdesk – http://www.freshdesk.com
• Get Satisfaction – http://getsatisfaction.com
• InboxHarmony – http://supportimation.com
• Zendesk – http://www.zendesk.com

Company Info:

• Launched: August 2010
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Jeremy Suriel, Alex Bard, Brad Birnbaum, and Gary Benitt
• Web site: http://www.assistly.com

Costs:

• Free trial
• Standard plan is $39/month
• Professional plan is $69/month
• Enterprise plan is $99/month