Teamwork Desk makes smooth sailing for online boating tycoon

Joe Andrade is a serial entrepreneur, with several innovative brands operating in the spheres of boating and content marketing. His current primary focus, MarineMotion, is a content marketing provider that helps boat-owners to sell or charter out their boats. MarineMotion is linked to another of Joe’s brands, Boaterbase, which clients can use to build an embeddable online listing for their vessel.

We caught up with Joe – who is currently pining for his own boat in the British Virgin Islands, which he can’t access due to lockdown measures – to find out how Teamwork Desk has ensured smoother sailing for his impressive portfolio of marine businesses.

How Desk has enhanced the adoption of MarineMotion’s software

MarineMotion and BoaterBase have delivered boat sales and charters galore for their clients, courtesy of their proprietary content marketing software. The only problem has been getting clients to the point where they are comfortable enough with using their software to reap its rewards.

“The adoption curve is the biggest challenge,” says Joe.

“You get all these help requests from people who just didn’t bother to read the directions, and then they tell you the software doesn’t work. Actually, they have to work with it!”.

Joe needed a helpdesk solution that would allow him to deal with these routine customer queries as efficiently as possible, while also providing a way to handle more complicated support requests.

…and that’s where Teamwork Desk came in

Long-time Teamwork customer Joe came onboard with our helpdesk software, Teamwork Desk, in summer 2020. The software instantly provided an efficient solution for handling customer support queries.

“Desk is a really nice interface for helping people,” says Joe.

When a customer has a more complicated support request, the helpdesk agent can create a ticket within Desk, and assign it to the team member who will be responsible for solving the issue. It’s a process Joe describes as “clean and simple.”

Within Desk, Joe has full visibility of the tickets his team has open, and also of everything they’ve already accomplished.

“Being able to go in there makes it really easy to manage everything,” says Joe.

“Sometimes I’ll even go back in time to see all the tasks I’ve completed. The historical data is really powerful, and I can search my tickets to find the solution to something I’m trying to remember how to do. It’s something I use especially to help with my own boat,” he says.

Not only has Desk given Joe a better system to help his customers; it’s also given him a better system to help himself.

Efficient customer support through a locked-and-loaded knowledge base In Joe’s view, one of the most valuable features of Desk is the knowledge base. With this feature, the helpdesk agent can immediately direct a customer to a piece of content, such as a tutorial video or article.

So, if a customer was having difficulties using a certain aspect of MarineMotion’s content management system, there’s a good chance that the helpdesk agent could solve the problem simply by loading in a link to some educational content.

“The idea you can just search for an article and pop the link into an email is great,” says Joe.

To have the ability to tell a customer to go look at a piece of writing to solve this problem is enormous. Answering customers queries is made even simpler through the option to use templated email responses.

As Joe puts it, “The canned responses are awesome.”

Desk & Teamwork: “it’s just beautiful”

While Joe’s knowledge base equips his helpdesk agents to solve a large proportion of customer queries via a simple email exchange, there are always going to be some issues which require further action.

Desk accommodates these relatively complex cases with a ticketing system. When something needs to be done for a customer – whether that means explaining how to use a functionality, advising on best practice, or anything else – the helpdesk agent creates a ticket within Desk, and assigns it to the team member who will do the necessary action. The ticket remains open until completed, so the system offers no opportunity for customer needs to fall down the cracks.

Crucially, Teamwork tasks can be created directly from a ticket in Desk, as the two software integrate seamlessly.

“The idea that I could generate and assign a task within Teamwork, straight from Teamwork Desk, was the number one reason I decided to switch my helpdesk from Zendesk to Teamwork Desk,” says Joe.

“When I get a help ticket in, I can automatically assign it as a task to my team members, who then get a notification in Teamwork. It’s just beautiful,” he says.

Without Teamwork and Desk, there’s no way we could do what we do Desk has rolled into Teamwork to offer a way of working that’s proving indispensable to how MarineMotion and Boaterbase work.

“Nowadays, I’d be devastated to go without that central functionality.”