How Castiron Helps Thousands of Customers With a Two-Person Support Team
- Company Size
- 17
- Industry
- Software
- Favorite features
- Shared Inbox, Knowledge Base, Reporting
Challenge: The Castiron team was having a difficult time keeping their Gmail inbox organized. Requests were slipping through the cracks, and some users were left waiting for answers. As they prepared to release their beta product, they knew they needed to provide their customers with an easier way to get in touch and a better customer experience.
Solution: The team decided to invest in a solution from day one, diving into Help Scout alongside the official release of their product. By leveraging Help Scout, the Castiron team was able to support thousands of customers with a two-person support team, all while improving issue tracking, streamlining workflows, and supporting some of the happiest food entrepreneurs in the world.
Meet Castiron
Castiron is a food business management platform built to help independent cooks, bakers, and artisans start, grow, and manage their online businesses. With Castiron, food entrepreneurs can take orders, manage inventory, accept payments, market their products, and track sales all in one place.
Beginning with Gmail
Matt Renie, product manager at Castiron (previously manager of customer success), knew that providing an exceptional customer experience should be one of Castiron’s goals from day one of launching their product.
He explained that in the early days of preparing to launch Castiron, they were relying solely on Gmail to correspond with alpha users, which limited their ability to respond efficiently, track requests and feedback, and ensure all users were getting answers.
Prior to officially launching Castiron, our customer success team and CEO were using Gmail to communicate with our users, which left us with lengthy, unorganized email chains. Soon we found ourselves having a hard time organizing requests and tracking issues to resolution — what requests were still outstanding? What was a support issue? What was product feedback?
They knew they needed a different solution to create structure, add professionalism to their customer communication, and ensure they were providing high-quality service.
Enter Help Scout
Renie knew it was important to implement an easy-to-use solution that would enable the small but mighty customer success team to manage requests in a timely manner while making it easy for their customers to get in touch with them. When it came to choosing a tool, Help Scout was top of mind for Castiron.
Help Scout’s simplicity, ease of implementation, and favorable startup pricing played a big role in choosing Help Scout over alternative options. Renie recalls:
It was really easy to get up and running quickly — literally within minutes we were set up. We had a one-to-two-person support team, and [Help Scout] met our needs from the get-go while setting us up to eventually scale.
What are some of Castiron’s favorite Help Scout features?
It provided us with a streamlined process for our customers to get in touch with our team easily. We have the ability to respond in real-time using the mobile app, and our knowledge base makes it easy for customers to help themselves.
Results: Improved issue tracking, streamlined workflows, and happier customers
Customer requests don’t fall through the cracks
With Gmail, it was easy for the team to lose track of a customer request before it was resolved. The company inbox felt disorganized, it was difficult to monitor the status of conversations in progress, and teammates couldn’t see who was replying to which customers (or even when they were responding).
With Help Scout’s Shared Inbox, the team was able to organize requests as they came in, easily see how long customers had been waiting for a response — and get to those customers faster — and see who was replying to which requests, preventing duplicate replies.
With Help Scout, nothing slips through the cracks anymore. Our entire team has easy visibility into support issues, and it’s clear who owns what tickets.
Streamlined workflows and scalable customer support
With a regular inbox, responding to an influx of support requests becomes overwhelming, time-consuming, and inefficient. On top of that, the only way customers can get answers is to send an email and wait for a reply.
In addition to using shared inbox features that make it easier to manage high-volume periods, like workflows and auto-replies, Castiron uses Help Scout’s knowledge base tool, Docs, to help even more customers.
By leveraging Docs, Castiron was able to create articles and encourage customers to turn to self-service support for FAQs, which allowed them to spend less time answering the same questions and more time helping other customers. Renie said:
Our knowledge base articles have over 10,000 views. Being able to meet our users where they are and enabling them to get answers on their own time has saved us hundreds of hours of work.
Help Scout has enabled Castiron to continue to meet its customers’ needs, even with a small support team:
With Help Scout, we’ve been able to scale our process to support thousands of customers with a two-person support team. In fact, we’ve grown our active user base by over 10x while only adding one part-time employee.
The happiest food entrepreneurs in the industry
With Gmail, insights were limited. The Castiron team wanted to learn more about how they could improve their customers’ experiences, how satisfied they were, and how they could be better supported. They were looking for data that email-only solutions just don’t provide.
With Help Scout’s reporting, the Castiron team gained insights into team productivity metrics like response and resolution times so they could identify opportunities to improve speed and efficiency. They were also able to monitor customer satisfaction ratings, which allowed them to track customer happiness and follow up with specific customers about their experiences.
Using the reports, we were able to see that over 70% of our tickets are responded to within one hour, which our customers always cite as a differentiator of why they love Castiron over our larger competitors. On top of quick response times, our happiness rating has always been above 95% while using Help Scout! We take pride in delivering the best customer service ever, and with Help Scout, we can quantify and track that.
Help Scout: Support made simple
Help Scout has become Castiron’s central hub for customer communication, enabling them with a simple solution to answer customers quickly and to keep them happy. Without it, they wouldn’t be able to support thousands of independent entrepreneurs across the globe in launching their food businesses.
Help Scout provides the easiest way to deliver an awesome customer experience. It’s the perfect mix of simple and professional, and it’s allowed us to track all outstanding customer issues without building an over-complicated support process.
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