Troops empowers Thycotic’s global customer support team to hit a 99% response rate

As an industry-leading cybersecurity software platform, Thycotic protects companies around the world from cyber-attacks. They serve 10,000+ customers worldwide, including 25 of the Fortune 100, while maintaining a 97% customer renewal rate and a 96% customer satisfaction rate.

Such a crucial role in protecting their customers’ data requires exceptionally high standards for Thycotic’s customer support team. They’re under pressure to solve customer problems as quickly and reliably as possible.

Thycotic turns to Troops to help them meet stringent service-level agreements (SLA) while delivering excellent customer experiences. Troops workflows and Slack messaging help them:

• simplify and speed up support ticket assignments,
• increase response rates and improve SLA compliance rates,
• foster team collaboration on high-severity support cases,
• and provide white-glove customer experiences for priority customers.

We spoke with Derrick Labaran, director of technical support at Thycotic Software, to learn more about how Troops supports Thycotic in meeting and exceeding their customers’ expectations.

As director of technical support for a cybersecurity company, Derrick Labaran says that meeting the demands of strict SLAs is of the utmost importance. “For us, our biggest thing is knowing about cases and knowing what stage the case is in so that we can react quickly and meet SLAs,” he says. “Troops gives us the flexibility to move quickly.”

Thycotic’s global team of cyber-defenders needs to spring into action 24/7

When it comes to nailing customer support, the stakes are high for Thycotic.

If something goes wrong with Thycotic’s software, it could mean exposing customers to any number of cyber-attacks—thus leaving those customers’ customers vulnerable to identity theft or hacking. Support tickets can come in at any time, from anywhere. It’s crucial that their 24/7 customer support team, distributed across several continents, adhere to time and prioritization demands of customer SLAs.

The problem is that timezones can make it tricky to meet SLA standards 100% of the time.

To ensure a timely response and avoid timezone lags, Thycotic assigns support teams to cases originating from the same locations. A case coming in from North America will go into the North American support team’s queue.

But if a North American case comes through at 8 p.m. EST, and the customer has a 12-hour SLA, that case needs to go to their Asia-Pacific support team. Thycotic needed a way to automatically route off-hours tickets to available teams.

To add another level of complexity, it’s also critical that Thycotic assign and prioritize each case according to its severity level.

“Depending on the severity, we have stringent response times,” Derrick told us. “Not only for the first response, but also so that [cases] are worked on consistently.”

Then there’s the nature of Thycotic’s support cases, which aren’t simple fixes.

“The cases that we get are incredibly complicated,” Derrick said. “The vast majority involve having a remote session with a customer, re-creating stuff in our own AWS [Amazon Web Services] or Azure.”

Thycotic uses Salesforce Support as its central source of customer data. But collaborating on complicated cases can be a challenge using Salesforce alone. Cases can go on for hours, days, and sometimes even weeks.

How Troops turbocharged Thycotic’s response rate from 75–80% to 99–100%

Troops helped Thycotic streamline the assignment and prioritization of support tickets. By pushing notifications to Slack, Troops gave Thycotic’s support team real-time visibility into support cases as they came in.

Getting critical information to the right people in real time

As soon as a case gets assigned in Salesforce, Troops sends a notification signal in Slack to the assigned agent with the severity, context of the issue, and details on who the agent will need to collaborate with.

“We have a very strong Slack culture, and people are always collaborating with each other there,” said Derrick. “The Slack notifications are much more effective in getting the team’s attention.”

Working on high-priority cases as a team

Troops also fosters collaboration by alerting the worldwide support team of high-severity cases.

“Severity 1 cases usually [come in through] a direct call-in from a customer,” Derrick told us. “The entire [worldwide] support team gets notified via Troops about the severity 1 case, and we handle them by hand-raisers. We do this because we want to make sure the support ticket is handled by someone with time.”

Bringing management in at the right time

If no one is available to handle a high-severity case, Troops sends a second alert 15 minutes later, notifying the worldwide management team that the case needs to be addressed immediately.

“We are always able to get an engineer to get on a call with a customer once they call in,” said Derrick. “And at worst case, a manager will service them 15 minutes later after the second Troops alert fires.”

Delivering Exceptional experiences to exceptional customers

Thycotic has some accounts that only very experienced engineers and customer experience managers should handle. In those cases, Troops alerts specific individuals when a top-tier account has submitted a request.

“I also do this for certain accounts so that I, myself, am notified every time those accounts submit a case,” Derrick said. “That allows me to look at the case myself and then decide what the most appropriate course of action is.”

The results: near-perfect SLA compliance

Beyond customer support: Thycotic turns to Troops for sales and customer success solutions

Thycotic also uses Troops to simplify processes for their sales and customer success teams. Here are just a few examples of Troops signals that Thycotic uses to power customer relationships and revenue:

• Sales coaching. Sales managers use Troops to coach reps in real time after calls, without digging around Salesforce to find the calls. Thycotic’s Director of Sales Development and Renewals, Dudley Arbaugh reports that his sales coaching workflow helps his sales development representatives (SDRs) ramp faster.

• Customer success. When a sales rep sells a certain product or sends a quote, Troops alerts the professional services team so they’re prepared to service/onboard a new client.

• Trial user onboarding. Thycotic plans to shift from campaign reports to real-time Troops alerts when a lead requests a trial, so they can speed onboarding and potential pipeline.

The Troops advantage

Thycotic’s global cybersecurity support team has met and exceeded a high bar of customer service excellence using Troops signals to automate key workflows.

Imagine what your support team will accomplish when partnering with Troops:

• Boost support response rates. Create workflows that automatically assign and escalate tickets based on any number of conditions, including severity, customer tier, location, and time unassigned.
• Deliver the best data for the quickest response. Troops integrations with major customer support platforms like Salesforce Support, Zendesk, Intercom, and Jira can help your team provide speedy and satisfying customer experiences.
• Empower your team to take ownership of individual challenges. Troops makes it easy for anyone to create automations to streamline inefficient processes holding them back.
• Accomplish more with less back-and-forth. No more hopping between apps and tabs or tracking down emails. Troops sends everything you need to know straight to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

If a global team of cyber-defenders can level up their support response to 99% SLA compliance, anyone can. Troops will help you get there.

Learn more about how your team can benefit from Troops.