Driven by frustrating interactions with customer service professionals in the B2B space, Robert Johnson founded TeamSupport with Eric Harrington with the goal of fostering effective communication to streamline support. With functionality reaching past that of a traditional ticketing system, TeamSupport is a Web-based help desk and service desk application that offers a complete customer support suite to facilitate collaboration between internal team members, other company employees, and clients. 

In July 2013, the company introduced a feature designed to prevent “ticket collision,” an issue that arises when multiple representatives work on the same customer ticket. “When companies rely on customer support software that doesn’t update in real time, they’re creating a potentially embarrassing situation for themselves,” Johnson, the company’s president and CEO, explains. “It’s very frustrating for customers when their trouble tickets don’t contain the most recent information, and it’s frustrating for the support representatives as well. They can’t do their jobs if they don’t have the most up-to-date information,” he says.

Using the new feature, customer service professionals can see who else has worked on the same ticket or is working on it in real time. “This doesn’t just apply to multiple customer service team members looking at one ticket,” Johnson clarifies. “The feature extends to other teams, too, meaning that if a sales representative is looking at the ticket, it will show up as well.” The feature also boasts an internal chat capability, which allows employees to discuss the problem and then attach the saved conversation to the ticket.  

In addition to “best of breed” (such as knowledge base) and multichannel tools including chat, self-service, and social tools, TeamSupport offers a number of other “compelling features,” such as a screen capture functionality, John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research at the Technology Services Industry Association, says. 

“TeamSupport has been the first to incorporate video into their support as an ‘out of box’ feature in their platform,” Ragsdale says. “Now customers can use video to capture the precise problems they’re having, and employees can troubleshoot with video tutorials. Imagine how much easier that is,” he adds. 

 Throughout the past year, TeamSupport has worked to improve its integration capabilities with other marquee business tools, including Jira, Oracle Cloud Marketplace, and Salesforce. In May, TeamSupport became one of the few help desk software suites to integrate extensively with Salesforce. With the two systems synchronized, any help ticket created using TeamSupport’s software will automatically create a case on Salesforce’s end, and vice versa. The integration reaches much deeper than just the ticketing process, however. “We aren’t a full-fledged CRM system,” Johnson says, “but this connection to Salesforce will allow businesses to build a more well-rounded view of their customers as they pull data in from Salesforce to populate the TeamSupport database.”

With companies such as AT&T, the National Basketball Association, FujiFilm, and Walmart on its list of clients, the Dallas-based company is one of the “best kept secrets” of the customer service field, according to Johnson. Yet, after being recognized with 10 industry awards in 2013, TeamSupport’s secret is out. Most notably, the company was honored by the Association of Support Professionals for having one of the year’s 10 Best Web Support Sites and, in September, won bronze in the Cloud Computing/SaaS Innovations category at the 2013 Golden Bridge Awards. Still, Johnson says the company is just getting started. 

“We’ve got a lot of exciting things happening in 2014,” Johnson says. “Stay tuned.”  —Maria Minsker