While the shifts of our first responders run round-the-clock, live 24/7 support is notably absent from the offerings of many Records Management System (RMS) or Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) providers. Even more surprising, if there is any live technical support, it may only be available during weekdays and limited hours. As a public safety software provider, Mark43 finds this unacceptable and has built a 24/7 support team; known as our Customer Help Desk (CHD). Located in Mark43’s LA office, the team is staffed 24/7/365, so there is always a team member available to answer phone calls and emails.
Similar to 911 dispatch centers that track their response rates, our CHD team also monitors the response rates of our support calls and emails. Within the past three months, our team has recorded a median time to first response of 27 minutes. The industry standard for the average time to first response is between 24 and 48 hours. Our team continually aims to improve the speed and accuracy of our responses and the time to resolution so our police officer and dispatcher clients can get back to what they do best — serving and protecting their community.
In order to prepare our CHD team to help our customers, each team member:
- Is subject to background checks and fingerprints for both internal and client use
- Participates in a minimum of three weeks of onboarding and product training prior to answering tickets
- Completes ongoing bi-weekly training to stay up-to-date on product and process changes
- Participates in customer-specific workflow training prior to agency launches so they can better assist users who need help
How the Help Desk Helps
Now, how does a service call work from start to close? It starts with a call to the CHD team. Our CHD team serves as a sounding board for users and communicates feedback to the appropriate teams at Mark43 so we can continually improve our applications. This way, the CHD can pass along feedback from our customers to the product team (in real time), which adds another layer of attention for issues or struggles our customers may be having with the platform.
Recently, the CHD team received a call from a customer with an enhancement request for our RMS reports. The requests were for some native (that is to say, non-browser) formatting, and for a native spell checker be added to the narrative section. This request was tracked by our CHD team, sent to our product team, and was then added to our design team’s schedule. From the design team, the enhancements were built by our engineers and quickly released in one of our bi-weekly product releases, another benefit of being a SaaS company.
The Help Desk Helps Mark43
Our Help Desk isn’t always busy with phones and emails, and are often tasked with other types of operational support work to keep our processes running smoothly. In addition to fielding general product questions from our growth, implementation, and customer success teams, the Help Desk occasionally performs other one-off tasks and projects, including:
- Testing features and bugs as needed by the QA team
- Verifying and reporting bugs to appropriate engineering teams
- Reporting customer-requested features and feedback to Mark43 project owner(s)
- Drafting how-to documentation for the training team
Working with the engineering and QA teams allows the Customer Help Desk to reinforce any new bug fixes and features, providing them the opportunity to stay up-to-date on platform changes. And working with the implementation and customer success teams provide the opportunity to better learn and internalize agency-specific workflows.
As the first member of Mark43’s support team, I’m proud of how our team has grown, while still maintaining our commitment of personalized and responsive support for all of our customer departments. As a team on the front lines of the Mark43 software experience, we recognized that the best way to help our customers — at any time of the day — was to increase the technical knowledge of our CHD. And at Mark43, we’re committed to this through open communication within teams and joint projects that better serve our customers and partners. This way, officers, and dispatchers can be sure that when contacting our CHD they’ll be speaking with a knowledgeable member of our team that can provide them the support they need.
Greer Davis is the Director of Operational Support at Mark43. As the first person at Mark43 to answer customer support calls and emails, she now manages a team that’s responsible for training and supporting agencies across multiple time zones. Read more from Greer on our approach to support here.
