Your Source for Providing a Better Customer Service and Customer Support Experience

Parature Service Desk Widgets

Service Desk Widgets allow you to have contextually relevant content from outside systems integrated into the Ticket Details page. With a widget, you can pass Ticket, Customer, or Account fields as URL parameters to the third-party system, allowing data specific to the ticket being viewed to be displayed in the customizable-size widget.

Custom Service Desk Widgets pull contextual data about your Tickets, Customers, or Accounts and insert them in a special frame in a ticket. You may only have one active widget at a time, but as many inactive widgets as you wish. Custom Service Desk Widgets currently only work with Parature Ticket. We suggest first trying out widgets on your Parature Sandbox as a best practice.

To get started on creating widgets: Read more »

Leveraging Parature Email Templates

Email Templates is one of the new features Parature introduced in the Parature ‘10 Release. Parature’s Email Templates can be used to improve readability of emails, enhance branding of email messages, and provide more control over the support experience. Check out the points below to see how you can improve the customer experience with the Email Templates feature:

Email Styling
Customize the design of the email notifications received by your customers and CSRs. These customizations can range from including a company logo or custom fonts, colors, and layouts. This feature also provides the ability to include applicable text, such as disclaimers, contact information, or department links. Read more »

Parature for Facebook

Newly Available Parature for Facebook Helps Companies Increase “Face-Time” while Keeping Support and New Customer Acquisition Costs Low

Today we announced the general availability of Parature for Facebook, the industry’s first and only customer service application that enables direct customer engagement through Facebook. The Parature for Facebook application, delivered on-demand through Parature’s software-as-a-service model, helps companies, educational institutions and government associations directly engage with their Facebook fans to resolve service issues, answer pre-sales questions and conduct one-to-one customer interactions, all within Facebook and accessible through an easily installed Support Tab on a Facebook page.

Several new and existing Parature customers have signed on as users of Parature for Facebook, but language learning software giant Rosetta Stone Inc. (NYSE: RST) made history today when it became the very first company in the world to unveil support and service through Facebook to its more than 6,000 fans. Read more »

Webinar - Facebook for Business: How to Engage and Support Your Customers Directly on Your Facebook Page

In the beginning, Facebook was viewed as a personal-focused networking tool. Now users outnumber the entire population of the United States.

Clearly, Facebook can be a powerful tool for brands, businesses, and non-profits. This webinar will help you maximize your business to get the most out of being on Facebook.

You will also learn how you can add the Parature for Facebook customer support application directly to your Facebook Page to ensure your customers’ experience is optimized.

Taking part in this webinar provides the opportunity to hear about the latest stats and changes on Facebook, as well as discover some unexpected surprises that can happen on your page when you are able to support customers directly from your Facebook Page.

This webinar is essential for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of what Social CRM on Facebook really means and learn about the new Parature for Facebook product.

Attend this webinar to: Read more »

How 2 Give GR8 #CustomerService & Have Your Followers 'Like' You in All Social Channels

The webinar “How 2 Give GR8 #CustomerService & Have Your Followers ‘Like’ You in All Social Channels” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions during the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Rich was unable to answer all of the great questions submitted; however he has been gracious enough with his time to answer each one within our blog.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that the answers to these questions may also help you understand how to leverage social media for better service.

If you did not attend the webinar, we invite you to watch it now. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here.

Sure, silence CAN imply that we’re “not clued in” and “not connected”….but what about when the mention is a rant? Or has definite potential to negatively spiral out of control?  How do we determine what’s safe and what’s too risky to respond to? Read more »

Webinar: How 2 Give GR8 #CustomerService & Have Your Followers 'Like' You in All Social Channels

Customers are increasingly turning to social media to air their service issues – especially when they feel companies could give a tweet about them through other channels. In the process, your service reputation is now out in the open for everyone to see. But some companies are leading the charge to use services like Twitter, Facebook, and virtual communities to brand their 21st century service identity.

This webinar will show you how to leverage social media for better service if you’re new to it, and how to sharpen your virtual service image if you’re an old pro. Topics we’ll cover include:

• Why your service is going public and going viral: a look at today’s digital consumer
• Social media service success stories: Comcast, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and more
• Understanding virtual service channels: Read more »

ParaConnect for Salesforce

Does Salesforce keep the most up-to-date information about your Accounts? Do you limit access to your Portal for only ‘active’ Accounts? If you answer YES to both questions, then you’ll be interested in this tip.

In Salesforce, the status of an Account is typically stored in a custom field on the Account record. That status is then reflected in Parature by an SLA or custom field. When an Account becomes inactive or canceled, the Salesforce record is updated. By default, ParaConnect for Salesforce only updates the Parature Account and Customer records if the corresponding Salesforce record was updated since the last sync. So how can translate the status change to the Customer records in Parature? The answer comes in the form of Salesforce Triggers.

The trigger for this scenario is will execute when a Salesfoce Account record is saved. It will proceed to “update” all Customer records that are associated to the Account record that was modified without actually making any changes to the Customer records. Read more »

Webinar: Why Customer Service is NOT Enough

The webinar “Why Customer Service is NOT Enough” was attended by hundreds of customer service and support professionals who submitted numerous questions during the webinar. Due to the time constraints of the event, Lisa was unable to answer all of the great questions submitted; however she has been gracious enough with her time to answer each one within our blog.

Whether you attended the webinar or not, you may find that the answers to these questions may also help you understand some of the strategies for improving the customer experience.

If you did not attend the webinar, we invite you to watch it now. Share your thoughts and continue the discussion here.

What about organizations who don’t really need to be on the phone all the time? We have an email to phone ratio of about 80:20. We only get on the phone if the issue is complex or critical, and needs personal explanation. We schedule calls with customers, and then get on the phone.

It sounds like your approach is a good one. Make certain your email responses are timely, within 4 hours is considered fast. Go back and check the content of the responses – eliminate jargon, write in complete sentences, be respectful and conversational. When on the scheduled call, have the “right” person on the call. Make certain that person is prepared and calls when promised and buy the Employees lunch…pizza, etc.  This would give the leaders a chance to visit with the Employees of the locations.

-Lisa Read more »

Parature offers a simple and easy way to place links to a website not hosted by Parature on your Parature Portal. In fact, the website will opened up directly in the Portal.

To create a Portal Tab, you must be logged in as an Admin. Go to the Portal Tabs page located under the Setup tab. Hit New Portal Tab, and fill out the form.

Setting up a new Portal tab

Read more »

Improving Search Techniques on Your Knowledgebase

Having difficulty finding what you want in the Parature Knowledgebase? The following tips are meant to provide enhanced techniques to improve search results. Also provided, are a few ideas on how to leverage your own knowledgebase to improve the satisfaction of your end users.

Searching the Parature Knowledgebase™

Search keywords rather than entire phrases. Let’s say you are looking for a video tutorial on how to submit a ticket. Your first thought may be to search “video tutorial how to submit a ticket” as your phrase, but this may not render the desired results because there are so many combined words that the search engine is looking for. Begin with something simpler like “submit a ticket” or “video submit ticket”. This kind of search may return more than one result, but it should be easier to find the article you are looking for. Read more »