Hover:
Planning for Excellent Customer Support

In the summer of 2008 Tucows Inc. was preparing to launch Hover, a service that provides Domain Registration, Domain Forwarding, DNS and Email services to wide range of customers.

But this wasn’t a typical new product launch. Hover was actually an integration of three existing Tucows services, each with different customers, each with different features. Hover would combine all of these services into a new streamlined product.

Customer training was going to be a big issue. Tucows would be migrating hundreds of thousands of personalized email addresses and domain names for existing customers into the Hover product. These customers would have to quickly become accustomed to new services and a new user interface.

New Support Solutions

Up until that point Tucows had been using an integrated suite of help desk applications. The suite was pretty good at a lot of things but wasn’t exceptional at anything. For the launch of Hover Ross Rader, General Manager for Hover, decided to take different approach.

Jon Clarke, Senior Customer Adviser at Hover describes the process:

For Hover’s support tools we wanted providers that were delivering excellence in their section of the market. This was important because we wanted to make sure that the Hover experience was a very positive and a very easy one. For customer tutorials and guides, ScreenSteps Live was the best solution.

Do One Thing and Do it Well

So what set ScreenSteps Live apart? Jon explains:

Using ScreenSteps was a snap. You can really do a whole lot of work with nothing more then just ScreenSteps itself. You don’t have to play around with multiple tools. You sit down, take screen shots, highlight things and upload everything to ScreenSteps Live. It’s all sequenced and ready to go. It’s really just so easy to get these lessons put together.

Branding & Integration

Hover wanted their customers to have a consistent experience throughout the customer support process. The custom branding available with ScreenSteps Live was key.

Jon continues:

It’s been wonderful to wrap our brand and the look and feel of the Hover website around ScreenSteps data. The ability to customize lessons into our own representation of what we wanted the knowledge base to be has been incredibly powerful.

Integration with other services was crucial as well. Hover decided upon ZenDesk as their help ticketing system. Jon configured ScreenSteps Live so that comments submitted by customers through ScreenSteps Live automatically create support tickets in ZenDesk. Help desk workers also have direct links to ScreenSteps Live manuals inside of ZenDesk. This makes it very easy to respond to customer inquiries. As they continue to use ZenDesk and ScreenSteps Live, Jon plans to further integrate the two services.

Support

As Hover was getting ready to launch, they found they had a few questions about how best to set up ScreenSteps Live and contacted Blue Mango for support.

Jon recalls the response:

The ScreenSteps Live support has been fantastic. They really get it when it comes to their customers. Getting access to people who know about the system and are really passionate about helping us out has been excellent. When we had been struggling with a solution, we decided to contact them. Later that afternoon we received an email with the exact css code we needed to solve our problem.

So How Has the Transition Gone?

How have customers responded with the transition of those 300,000 personal and domain names into Hover since the launch in December 2008?

Jon tells us about the reactions they have received:

We’ve received fantastic responses from customers about ScreenSteps. They love that they can leave comments, that they can interact easily with the lessons and that the lessons are very graphical and laid out step by step. That is exactly what people need to be able to absorb the information quickly and to feel very empowered by their knowledge of how to use our services.

There was a comment that a customer left about a tutorial that we put up. They just wrote in all caps, “THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!”

Note: ScreenSteps Live users can receive 25% off a new Hover account at Hover by using the coupon code “ScreenSteps”.

See an example of ScreenSteps Live by visiting Hover's ScreenSteps Live Site