Recruiterbox empowers customer support with Loggly

Loggly has transformed our processes and helped us be much more effective in working with our customers.

Chelsea Stroh Head of Customer Happiness, Recruiterbox

Highlights:

• Reduced turnaround times for bug-related issues by as much as 67%
• Enables non-technical team members to solve customer problems using log data
• Collaborates more effectively across a global operation

Delivering on a Promise of Customer Happiness Requires New Tools

For Recruiterbox, an Applicant Tracking System provider, customer success is a core company value. Founded in India, the company knew that it would need to operate differently to embed this value into its business as it expanded into the United States.

The customer happiness team at Recruiterbox works remotely from various locations across the U.S. “We take support very seriously,” says Chelsea Stroh, head of customer happiness at Recruiterbox. “With the time zone difference between our U.S. customers and the Recruiterbox development team, my team needs tools that enable us to work independently to solve customer issues. However, no one on the team is technical.”

Non-Technical Team Members Couldn’t Find Immediate Answers

Recognizing the importance of centralized log data in troubleshooting, the development team at Recruiterbox first deployed Loggly in mid-2015 to support operational troubleshooting. In addition to errors and exceptions, Recruiterbox logs capture-user actions – everything on which users click within the system. However, the U.S.-based customer happiness team depended on the India-based development team to access this information and interpret its meaning. When a customer reported a problem, this could translate into several days of back-and-forth communications. Looking at how these information gaps affected the business, the development team realized that the customer happiness team could significantly accelerate the time-to-issue resolution with direct access to log insights.

Why Loggly?

With Loggly, the Recruiterbox development team knew that it had a log management solution that was easy enough for its non-technical colleagues to use. So it added the customer happiness team as Loggly users, providing explicit instructions on how to troubleshoot common problems. “Loggly has given us a way to learn what’s happening with our customers and stay informed,” Stroh explains.

Solution

Over time, Recruiterbox has streamlined the Loggly experience for the customer happiness team. Developers turned their instructions on how to search the data into saved searches, which store key parameters. It then built the customer happiness team a Google Chrome extension that pulls customer information out of freshdesk, the company’s ticketing system, and automatically generates the search parameters to pull up that customer’s logs in Loggly. It can even customize search results for specific types of problems (such as the customer looking for a specific report). The team can immediately spot messages that were sent to understand customer behavior and look for errors or potential bugs.

“I’m surprised how attached I have become to Loggly,” Stroh says. “I can’t imagine doing my job without it.”

Extending Log Analysis Significantly Decreased Time to Resolution

Empowering the customer happiness team with Loggly has transformed customer support processes at Recruiterbox. “Before, we might see that an email was successfully sent through SendGrid, but we couldn’t tell whether it contained the applicant report that our customer was looking for,” Stroh reports. “With the visibility we get through Loggly, we have decreased the turnaround time for fixing bugs by as much as 67 percent. And just as importantly, we have eliminated frustration from everyone’s point of view: my team, the developers, and our customers.”

When a customer reports a problem, the assigned customer happiness team member uses log data to understand the actions leading up to that problem. For example, he or she looks for 400 or 500 status codes, which could mean that a file is missing or the code isn’t operating correctly, or continues to gather information that the development team needs to identify the problem. If someone on the team encounters an issue that he or she can’t fix, he or she can share the relevant logs with developers by adding a Loggly link to the ticket. This saves research time for the developers, and they can immediately start working on a fix. “It’s really helpful to be able to segregate true issues and bugs from a customer clicking in the wrong place,” Stroh says.

Alerting Prevents Problems from Affecting the Business

Recruiterbox routes Loggly alerts directly to the customer happiness team so that they can prevent potential issues from becoming customer problems. For example, the team receives alerts if a customer is sending large volumes of messages. “This often happens when the customer is interacting with a lot of candidates, but it may also signal a problem in the account,” Stroh explains.

Stroh and her team are continuing to work with their engineering counterparts to identify new alerts that will help them deliver proactive support. “We want to be able to reach out to customers and let them know how they can make our system work better for them,” Stroh says.

Log Data Improves Collaboration

Log insights create a shared understanding to make discussions more productive, for example during the daily standup meetings in which the Recruiterbox team discusses open tickets. Bringing the two teams closer together keeps everyone focused on customer success.

Stroh offers a hint for developers: “Be sure to teach your non-techies and praise them when they use your tools. As they build their skills, they’ll be more confident in how they interact with customers.” For customer support teams, she advises: “Ask for what you need. Having visibility into your logs is really empowering, and it wasn’t much work for our technical team.”