Optimize customer support with Smart Tables for Confluence: Boost efficiency and uncover business insights
In this highly competitive and customer-driven landscape, exceptional customer support isn’t just a service anymore; it has become a competitive advantage. Customers today expect seamless, timely solutions, no matter what channel they use to raise the issue. Businesses now must go beyond quick responses to meet these expectations and improve product quality.
Without the right tools, you can’t expect your team to be highly responsive and efficient. Providing good tools allows your support team to resolve support tickets efficiently and provide insights that drive product improvement. It might not be an issue for you if you already have an extensive support team managing customers’ queries. But if you have just launched your product and started growing your team, getting an excellent tool for your team doesn’t have to drain your account.
In fact, Jira Service Management (JSM) is excellent at helping your support team track ticket resolution, especially in the software development industry. Integrating Confluence with JSM allows you to organize all the documentation, content, and files your team needs to deliver high-quality service every time.
But it doesn’t stop there. Adding Smart Tables to your Confluence pages will elevate your team’s experience, streamline their process, and, hence, increase their productivity.
So, if you’re managing a small support team or thinking about starting a support team, this article is for you. We will discuss some of the best practices of using Confluence and Smart Tables for Confluence, discover a few of the cool features of Atlassian Intelligence, and, last but not least, share our favorite reporting tips using Smart Tables.
Understanding customer support and ticket volume
Let’s start by understanding a few related concepts. First, we have customer support. It is one of the most crucial teams, whether your product has recently been launched or has already reached maturity. Customer support teams are the people who help customers when they encounter trouble with a company’s products or services. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that customers successfully solve any issues they face with the company’s product and that they continue to happily use your product to solve the main issue they chose it for, aka the job the product was hired for in the first place.
Next, let’s look into customer support tickets and customer support ticket volume. Customer support tickets are raised by customers who have a query or problem related to the product or service they are using. These problems can be classified to:
- Technical Issues
- Billing and Payments
- Product Inquiries
- Complaints and Feedback
- Account Management
- Policy Questions
- Other categories, depending on product specifications
Customer support ticket volume is the number of tickets or queries received by a customer support team from the customers. Tickets can come through different channels, such as:
- Emails
- Phone calls
- Social media messages
- Live chat queries
However, ticket volume is volatile. It can change with product complexity, number of customers, or even seasonal demand. Ticket volume may give information on how many issues or requests customers raise, but it doesn’t always show the support quality.
A high number of tickets means customers are engaged and your product is in demand, but it might also point to problems with the product or communication. The real focus should be not only on handling the volume but also on understanding the types of issues and solving them effectively to keep support quality high. For that, you need organized documentation that is easily accessible to the support team for effective problem-solving.
Efficient documents with Smart Tables
To ensure every customer gets the best support, you need consistent messaging across all platforms. This means all customers should get a message that matches the brand’s voice at every touch point. Also, one issue should be explained and solved the same way every time and with every customer. Businesses must consistently deliver the same value, messaging, quality, and services to customers from the first interaction to the post-purchase support to ensure they will stick around.
However, that is easier said than done. You can’t expect consistency and productivity from your support team if you don’t provide the right tools and guidelines. Confluence can be your team’s go-to wiki. It is the perfect tool to create your knowledge base, centralize potential customer issues, and share best practices. This way, you can guarantee your customers get an excellent, consistent experience and have their issues fixed faster. And, of course, you also guarantee that your team’s working process is seamless.
Stating information in big blocks of words is difficult for readers to navigate, but having it in a table form makes it easier and faster to find the correct information. But not just any table can do that; you need a Smart Table that adds filtering, Excel functions, and reporting features to native Confluence Tables.
It’s simple. Here is how it works: Once you have enabled your Smart Tables for Confluence, you can insert a Smart Table macro from the macro list or through the shortcut “/ Smart Table”.
And if you forgot to start with that and have already started writing your documentation on a native Confluence table, you can easily convert it to Smart Tables from the page view.
Once the table is set up and documentation pages are published, your support team can use the Smart Tables filtering option directly from the Confluence page view by selecting only the needed categories. This will help them quickly identify the specific issue the customer is facing and how to solve it.
You can include in your table as many details as you want to help them filter between the different options faster.
Atlassian Intelligence to summarize your Confluence page and more
We have seen the importance of well-detailed and organized documentation in supporting your team. But let’s be honest: no one likes to read a long document if they don’t really need it. So why not do your team one more favor and generate AI summaries using “Summarize writing” by Atlassian Intelligence to include a page summary that will help your team quickly find any needed details and save time, which they will surely appreciate.
This is not the only feature that Atlassian Intelligence provides; you can basically use it as your personal writing assistant to help you create the content you need. Find out all about it here.
Support tickets: your wealth of hidden insights
Finding efficient ways to manage support tickets is a challenge all businesses face. As previously mentioned, simply responding to customer inquiries and managing ticket volume will not give you a competitive advantage. In fact, along with ticket resolution, continuous team training, and performance monitoring, you should also analyze tickets to find valuable and relevant business insights brought to you directly by customers. Therefore, customer support tickets are not just routine tasks; they actually can enhance your approach to customer satisfaction and product improvement. Hence driving your company’s growth. And don’t worry; we’re not scaring you off from going through the adventure of building your digital product; we’re just giving you a heads-up.
So, let’s take an example for our case: a few-year-old tech startup providing a digital product. This startup is having moderate growth with an increasing adoption of its solution. Therefore, this company is likely in the scaling phase. It is seeing steady growth in sales and installs but is also dealing with some challenges, such as user churn, support issues, and product improvement.
Here, we have a sample of historical data from a one-year period of support tickets and some key metrics such as sales, app installs, uninstalls, and support costs.
Once you convert your native Confluence table to a Smart Table, you can add different Excel functions to perform any necessary calculations.
Another cool thing about the Smart Tables app is that it is also very practical for data visualization. Because we sure know that well-represented information helps any decision-maker see the bigger picture when making strategic decisions.
In this example, various charts were created to analyze business performance and find correlations between the different metrics. Those charts helped to highlight business trends and drive insights into customer behaviors and opportunities for improvement. In fact, when comparing the trends of support tickets and sales, we can find that a peak in support tickets corresponds with lower sales in the same month. This could indicate that unresolved technical problems impacted the customer journey, reduced conversions, or caused potential customers to churn. In addition, we observe during another month that sales increase corresponds with high product inquiries, which could suggest that there is a growing number of users interested in learning about the product.
Another helpful feature in Smart Tables for Confluence is choosing what data to represent by selecting and unselecting the data range from the chart legend. You can also customize the chart type based on your needs and what best fits your data. Hence, you can focus your analysis only on relevant elements for your decision-making.
Of course, the correlations between all metrics will differ from one business to another and will also depend on your industry or niche. However, your business can’t achieve sustainable growth unless you understand how all its aspects are connected and affect each other.
If you found these different Smart Tables features interesting, check out how you can also use Smart Tables for Confluence to revolutionize sales tracking and help you create data reporting all in one place.
Do you still have any questions regarding Smart Tables for Confluence? Book a demo and let us get to know you and answer your questions!
