Teamwork Desk frees GO Creative from email overload

GO Creative is a marketing and web agency dedicated to the needs of small businesses. From their headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, they build websites for local companies, then take care of the work behind the scenes: website maintenance, SEO, CRO, e-commerce, marketing, automation, and more.

When GO Creative signed up to Teamwork Desk in 2018, they had been looking for an affordable customer support solution that would keep pace with their growing team. Director Grant O’Neill knew the ticketing system they had been using wasn’t the best fit, and they needed a solution that gave their support team more tools to track incoming queries. What he didn’t anticipate was that Teamwork Desk would solve the entire company’s communication needs.

Email overload

Before adopting a help desk system became the industry standard, GO Creative was trying valiantly to manage their inboxes. Their team of multitaskers kept up as best they could, but there were too many emails from customers and back-and-forth threads behind the scenes as they tried to give the most precise answers. As the team grew, so did the volume of communication.

Grant wanted software with a shared inbox, so anyone at GO Creative could pick up an email and move it forward. His team had been through several situations where a message had gotten lost or delayed because it was directed to an individual who was on holidays or hadn’t recently checked their email accounts.

He was hoping he could find a solution that would be able to integrate with the other software GO Creative used. As an existing Teamwork user, Grant was excited to see that Teamwork Desk would fully integrate with Teamwork’s work management solution — and it offered superior features to other ticketing solutions he had been trialing. “The timing was perfect. Just when I needed better choices, Teamwork was there,” he said.

Command over communication

Grant chose to adopt the winning combo of Teamwork, Teamwork Desk, and Teamwork Chat.

Grant spends a large portion of every day in Teamwork Desk, methodically responding to emails and resolving requests instead of treading water in a flood of emails. “Literally everything we do with every client is through Teamwork Desk. We actually don’t even use our internal, personal email addresses for any purpose other than things like logging into systems and signing up for newsletters. I pretty much open up Teamwork Desk at the start of each day and it’s always open,” said Grant.

Advanced features that clear email clutter have made Teamwork Desk their centralized source of communication throughout the company. Incoming tickets, from queries to project requests to invoices, are immediately sorted into smart inboxes by email address, status, or other conditions, so team members have more information starting with the very first interaction. GO Creative stays on top of urgent needs by grouping tickets into a range of Smart Inboxes, which ensures they don’t miss a single customer need. Notes can be added right in the ticket to expedite information sharing, which cuts down on back-and-forth exchanges when solving more challenging questions.

Teamwork Desk’s integrations — with both Teamwork software and other platforms that GO Creative uses frequently — have been a huge timesaver in everyone’s workflow. Actionable items are clearly spelled out using tasks on tickets, which can be viewed either in Teamwork Desk or Teamwork, and ensure that team members never have to switch screens to add the information. Notifications like invoice payment confirmations, project activity logs, and website issues are automatically delivered to the people who need to see them using triggers. Once again, there’s no need to log into other software or keep multiple tabs open to make sure every detail is completed.

The combination of triggers, increased visibility, and custom statuses has really been key in getting tickets resolved quickly. Since Teamwork Desk can give multiple people visibility into incoming tickets, there are no loose ends. Tickets don’t languish in private email accounts anymore, and each ticket has an automatic status reminder for follow-up if it’s gone unresolved for too many hours or days.

" I’m extremely process oriented, so I’ve used the features in Teamwork Desk to foolproof everything possible. Teamwork Desk lets me do that, and at the end of each day, our aim is to reach “inbox zero” where there are no more tickets needing immediate attention. The open API lets GO Creative connect with other programs they rely on, like Zapier and their favorite invoicing software. This flexibility gives them more information within Desk and fewer chances that mistakes will creep in.

Happier & faster

After ditching email confusion for Teamwork Desk, GO Creative’s workflows, decisions, resolution times, and team collaboration are considerably faster. Team members can quickly bring in other team members if they have an issue, and customers are happier with the turnaround time on their questions. “There’s no doubt that Teamwork Desk has made us more efficient, which saves money and makes us money,” Grant said.

Team members are collaborating more effectively and learning how to resolve problems on their own. Notes and tasks provide clear, immediate directions on the next steps needed, which helps team members quickly understand which coworkers are the in-house experts on certain topics. There’s less lag time on customer responses, which builds more confidence and expertise on the fly.

Teamwork Desk’s reliability has given GO Creative opportunities to keep finding innovative ways to complete their work in less time, free of cumbersome workarounds or constant copy-and-paste interruptions to transfer information into a different platform.