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How trials work - getting started with Influx

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by   Alex Holmes

With Support as a Service, we have a pre-built, pre-managed team, ready to help answer tickets in your help desk.

But, every company is different, and every set of questions that your customers will be asking you is different.

So, we’ve devised a training and free trial period to get started.  This usually includes one week of training and two weeks of answering tickets.  After these three weeks, we request our first payment if you want to continue.

After this first payment, our pricing moves monthly based on the number of tickets we answer for you each month.  You can track your usage on your usage page and track monthly invoices on your invoices page.

Step one:  Commencement meeting

During the commencement meeting, we introduce you to your client captain, trial project manager and account manager.  Each of these people ensure a different area of success during your trial.

We use this session to introduce everybody and ask you to articulate what you expect from us, as well as the history of your business and support systems.

We usually record the commencement meeting for future training sessions.

We also use the commencement meeting to organize future training sessions and check ins, so we can start creating a support roadmap.

Step two: Training sessions

We typically organize one to three training sessions over the course of one week.  The number of training sessions depends on the scope of work you want us to do and the complexity in your product.

When you want us to answer many different types of tickets, we usually start with just your ten most common types of questions - for example FAQs or known product questions - and then we plan training and expansion as a v2.

Going into the first training session, we ask that you compile a list of the most common types of questions along with how you would expect us to answer them.  Sharing any sample tickets with the correct responses would be a big help.

Training sessions usually cover the following criteria:  Tickets you want answered, how to identify these tickets, how to answer these tickets and general brand voice or communication style guidelines.

If you don’t have a specific brand voice defined yet, we can suggest one based on working with previous clients.

One of the easiest ways to train us to share examples of specific tickets that you answered yourself in the correct way.

Step three: Two week free trial

One week after your first training session, we start your trial period.

Usually this means we start drafting responses after your last training session. With each drafted response, we ask you to approve or give us feedback.

It’s important to give us as much feedback as possible during this free trial period.  In addition to helping individual agents, we use this feedback to build our own documentation on how to make our answers better and improve our internal systems.  We use this internal documentation to train all future agents working on your account.

Important:  We don’t send any live responses until you specifically give us the green light to do so.

Need extra training?  That’s fine, but we still usually make the first charge three weeks after the first training session.

Step four: Continuing your service and payment

We request payment three weeks after your first training session.  We usually mark this payment date with a calendar invite.

We calculate your first payment based on our expected output for the upcoming month.  We usually do this by defining the number of responses in the last week of your trial and extrapolating this number for a whole month (multiply by 4.5).

Important:  Starting with your second payment, every invoice is based on our actual number of responses using our payment calculator and you can track all usage and invoices in your dashboard.

Once your paid service begins, we start training additional agents on your account and plan for ticket bursts and weekend coverage.

Starting your trial

Interested in starting a trial or have any questions?  Get in touch with us here to talk to someone.


About the author

Photo of Alex Holmes

Alex Holmes

Alex runs Marketing and Client Success at Influx. He works with both existing and future clients. Favorite support experience of all time: iTunes and Optus.