Centralizing Customer Support With HappyFox: How the Robust Help Desk Software Streamlines and Automates Ticket Management

Centralizing Customer Support With Happyfox

TL; DR: A cloud-based help desk system empowering more than 12,000 organizations, HappyFox organizes customer feedback from multiple channels and devices into an intuitive interface that maximizes usability and efficiency. The company helps support teams minimize response times by consolidating email tickets, phone calls, and live chat into a single view. Hosting providers, in particular, will appreciate HappyFox’s time-saving automation, along with the company’s tools for measuring, monitoring, and reporting on various service-level agreements. Founder and CEO Shalin Jain shared how HappyFox grew from a company he started in his bedroom in India to a global platform serving large companies around the world.

As a teenager, Shalin Jain frequently skipped college classes to work at a nearby tech company in Chennai, India. Soon after, he turned down a competing job offer — then launched a business named after the long commute he didn’t want to take.

Tenmiles, which Shalin ran from his bedroom, started when he convinced a neighbor to code an app for him.

“We built a bunch of successful products that people love to use,” Shalin said. “I grew tremendously from each product we built and released. Every product we launched got better.”

Eventually, Shalin and Tenmiles spun off the most successful software program into its own company. HappyFox, an inclusive help desk platform, delivers on a tall order of making customers happy, he said. Now, thousands of companies from around the world use the software to centralize, automate, and improve support processes.

“We realized that the people using the software are only dealing with people’s problems and issues,” he said. “HappyFox needs to be exciting, easy to use, beautiful to look at, and not a bunch of forms and complicated interfaces that make things even more complex. If support is a good experience for companies and their employees, then customers are going to be more likely to buy their product and stick around.”

Solving the Challenges of Multiple Support Channels and Devices

As the technology behind traditional customer support systems has changed, Shalin said customers’ patience for responses has waned.

“Hosting companies traditionally used toll-free numbers, where people call in and talk about the issue they’re having,” he said. “Often, they experience a complicated automated system and a lot of time on hold.”

Graphic showing how HappyFox consolidates customer feedback

HappyFox pulls feedback from email, social media, voice, chat, and other platforms into an easy-to-read dashboard.

On the other side of the system, agents regularly have to wait for customers to carry out instructions, wait for servers to load, or software to install — even if the client is using more efficient live chat or email ticketing systems.

“With HappyFox, we try to join all these disconnected channels in an omnichannel experience where, as a support agent, I have a full catalog of knowledge of what this customer has said,” Shalin explained.

HappyFox converts email, phone, chat, social, and web requests for help into a consolidated ticketing system and organized dashboard where support teams can quickly assign, respond to, and address issues.

The company’s development team further expanded the company’s reach by creating HelpStack, an open-source project that consolidates customer support with organizations’ mobile apps.

“People don’t have to go to an external site,” Shalin said. “They can simply create a ticket right on the app, and it’ll look just as if they’re sending you a text message.”

How HappyFox Stands Out: Comprehensive Issue and SLA Management

According to Shalin, HappyFox is most commonly praised for what he considers a very basic aspect of customer support systems: a well-designed interface that enables users to view entire conversations.

“When I go into even the most complicated issue, I’m able to grasp all the important pain points within a minute or so of skimming through the entire ticket,” he said. “It seems like an obvious thing for any help desk, but common sense is not that common, after all.”

Screenshots of HappyFox SLA management tools

HappyFox easily lets companies track their performance against multiple service-level agreements.

The ability to create and manage different service-level agreements, another HappyFox differentiator, particularly resonates with hosting providers that frequently make different promises based on the type of hardware or service provided.

“A lot of help desk vendors out there just allow you to configure one SLA across the entire system,” Shalin said. “We have a great interest in keeping the hosting industry in mind for when you need multiple SLAs for the different types of customers.”

By simultaneously targeting your support teams’ separate service goals, Shalin said HappyFox can help organizations prioritize particular issues and customers.

“If I raise an issue about, let’s say, wanting to start a reseller account, that’s not nearly as urgent as, ‘My website is down,'” he said. “We keep it really organized for the company to be able to measure and perform on all sorts of metrics.”

Ticket Templates and Smart Rules Automate Workflows and Save Time

The largest advantage to companies adopting HappyFox, according to Shalin, is overall efficiency and improved response times.

“With the same number of people, you can respond so much faster,” he said. For example, ticket response templates save time and reduce errors with manual typing.

HappyFox dashboard and CEO and Founder Shalin Jain

CEO and Founder Shalin Jain designed HappyFox around a strong, positive user experience for support agents.

“Agents can just apply the template and make subtle modifications if they need to,” Shalin said. “They can take all the customer inputs, do the least amount of typing, and quickly address the ticket.”

The templates are just one instance of how HappyFox uses automation to streamline organizations’ workflows and limit customer support costs as their client base grows.

For instance, HappyFox can instantly assign tickets to support representatives based on shifts, qualifications, and availability.

“All of that is very easily achievable with HappyFox, and it’s a big time-saver,” Shalin said. “Our automation features are so easy to implement, and placed in such a good position inside the software, that it will always get triggered. We see a high adoption rate of these features.”

Customer-Driven Development Deepens HappyFox User Experience

Rather than shallowly covering a broad range of services, Shalin said the HappyFox team prefers to look inward to solve deeper problems for its clients.

“Our features are very deep, detailed, and continuously optimized over a long period of time,” he said, adding the approach results in a 98% customer retention rate. “Keep in mind, we’re a subscription-based platform, so it’s not like people buy once and forget it. They have to renew, and we’ve done exceptionally well because we have taken care of our customers and their problems.”

HappyFox debuted a new user interface in August as part of an updated platform that will include powerful reporting tools and a built-in business intelligence feature. Shalin estimated about 80% of the company’s product road map centers around what improvements existing customers want to see.

“We have worked on very, very interesting projects for customers and then try to make it a mainstream feature available to all of HappyFox,” he said. “Our entire team learns from our customers. We are trying to maximize the depth of our product, compared with the breadth of the product.”

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