If there’s one thing I knew about customer support before starting at ClickUp, it’s that it takes a very special kind of person to be good at it: someone who is incredibly patient, amazing with technology, and a natural people-person.
That person is not me.
My experience with customer service is a threadbare tapestry woven by stints as a retail worker in a gothic boutique and a server at a Mob-owned sports bar. I learned that the customer is, in fact, almost never right, but you get way more tips and higher commissions by keeping your mouth shut and pretending that they are.
Suffice it to say, I needed to do a lot of digging to find out how the affable, tech-savvy humans on ClickUp’s Customer Support Team manage to be so damn good at it. Turns out, half of it is genuinely loving the very platform they help users understand, and the other half is genuinely loving to help people become more productive.
So whether you’re looking to step up your own customer care capabilities or just want a deep dive into how some of the nicest, most efficient people in the workforce use ClickUp, let’s dig in together!
How ClickUp Views Customer Support
Even if you’ve never worked in a customer-facing role, you’ve definitely relied on customer support before. And because of this, you’ve definitely felt the difference between good and bad support.
Bad support is being kept on hold for hours, passed around to a hundred different tired reps and robots, and figuring out that there’s really nothing anyone can do to help you so you might as well go scream into a pillow.
Great support is getting prompt service from an empathetic human, staying on the line until your issue is solved, and hanging up with increased confidence in what you’re doing in life.
According to a HubSpot study, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer good customer service and yield high customer satisfaction. On the flip side, a customer is four times more likely to switch to a competitor if the problem they’re having is service-based.
Let’s just say, ClickUp didn’t earn a $1B valuation in three years by undermining the power of a satisfied customer—or the equally valuable users on our free plan.
To fully appreciate what makes ClickUp’s team of Customer Support agents the powerhouse it is, you need to know the nine core values of our company, which are perhaps none the more present than within our CS (Customer Support) champions:
These individual core values are the anchor for every human in ClickUp’s Customer Support department, but the collective ship is fueled by one beautiful thing: an app built to serve.
What Customers (& Customer Support Reps) Really Need
In general, no matter what type of industry the product lives within, these are the goals of a customer support representative:
⏰ To provide timely, empathetic assistance to customers
😊 To answer all questions or concerns with kindness and clarity
💰 To help customers use the product in the most cost-effective way
👍 To ensure the customer feels confident in their decision to use this product
The above goals are the basic building blocks, but there are many more specific goals and KPIs you can dive into.
It sounds pretty simple, but it turns out that many businesses don’t provide the necessary tools for their customer support agents to deliver stellar service.
While interviewing some of the lovely folks on our CS team, I was surprised to hear that quite a few of them had almost turned their backs on the technical support industry before coming to ClickUp. Whether it was unsupportive leadership or insufficient software to keep up with the modern customer’s needs, the importance of taking care of the people who take care of the user was crystallized.
I previously worked in Higher Education and I lost countless hours switching between platforms and tools to get projects done.
I worked at a large enterprise’s national help desk and our systems made it really hard to get big-picture context of trends and issues. I could hunt for a ticket or hunt for a name, but I couldn’t see trends or what was happening!
Keeping our internal resources organized was a huge problem at my last company. We used Google Drive but everything was all over the place and a lot of things never got updated.
So what is it about ClickUp’s platform that has solved so many of these common pain points while reigniting peoples’ passion for providing help?
It all comes down to the same key to great customer service: building the product around the needs of the people as individuals.
The Features that Fuel our Customer Support
ClickUp, being the non-opinionated, fully adaptable software it is, is loved by our Customer Support team for so many personal reasons.
Army veteran and current Customer Support Manager, Jake Sines, finds ClickUp’s library of views endlessly helpful for organizing his team in a way that makes the most sense to him.
Jacquie Lolong, a Customer Support Lead, is obsessed with the pre-built Forms. She relies on them to instantly report any bugs that users come across and enjoys how each report instantly becomes a new task to follow up on so other customers don’t face the same issue!
But in surveying so many CS reps, I kept seeing the same three ClickUp features being named as the absolute game-changers for Customer Support roles:
🤖 Automations
What it is in one sentence:
- Automations in ClickUp are pre-built tools you can customize to create consistent processes that happen automatically within a task, no busywork required.
Why CS ❤️’s this feature:
- “[Automations] really help us assign tasks based on criteria or even send emails based on statuses, instantly.” —Holly Peck, Coaching Program Manager
- “We have many objectives for each quarter; ClickUp Automations help us organize the chaos in our workflow.” —Jake Sines, Customer Support Manager
- “[Customers] love the time they save by creating any ClickUp Automation, using Templates, and using things like Home view to work from a centralized location. A solution for them is a solution for us!” —Haven Soliman, Coaching Specialist
⚙️ Custom Fields
What it is in one sentence:
- Custom Fields in ClickUp are editable, organizational add-ons that help you track, sort, and filter your work according to your Workspace’s needs.
Why CS ❤️’s this feature:
- “Custom Fields are my all-time favorite ClickUp feature! They help us organize and capture unique data within seconds.” —Mandy Mekhail, Manager of Quality Excellence
- “Custom Fields are a MUST. We are able to put so much information about a task in those Custom Fields and this tool totally elevates whatever we are working on. I also love being able to group or sort by them.” —Jen Roth, Customer Support Manager
- “When it comes to delivering on our #1 core value of the best customer experience ever, we cannot afford to miss anyone’s issues! Using Custom Fields in ClickUp tasks for our coaching calls (which is part of the ClickUp customer service team) ensures that we don’t miss a single customer connection because we’re so well-organized! —Holly Peck, Coaching Program Manager
📑 Docs
What it is in one sentence:
- ClickUp Docs are where you create professional documents and collaborate on anything from SOPs and process wikis to idea banks and meeting minutes.
Key functions in Docs for CS:
- Doc Style: choose the doc style that best represents your work—Knowledge-based style, Classic, or Blog style
- Relationships feature: easily link related tasks and pages within the Doc page
- Rich Text Formatting: adjust font size (small, medium, large), and choose from various font and highlighting colors to emphasize important details
- Nesting: add sub-pages to the parent Doc for better document organization and easy reference
- Authors: add multiple authors and get a clear view of who has contributed to the Doc
- Real-Time Editing: edit a document alongside other team members to maximize collaboration
- Collaboration Detection: see when a team member views, comments, or edits a document
Why CS ❤️’s this feature:
- “We use Docs to write down ALL of our processes which makes bringing on new team members as easy as possible. These SOPs make things SO easy for the team!” —Holly Peck, Coaching Program Manager
- “In our effort to provide the best customer service, we have several Docs for processes and training materials to ensure that we’re giving both reps and users our best at each turn.” —Mandy Mekhail, Manager of Quality Excellence
- It’s life-saving being able to put all of our resources and duties in one easy-to-find place with Docs! CS work is tough if you don’t have all the answers for customers, but our Docs help us reference all those answers quickly. —Jacquie Lolong, Customer Support Lead
What About our Beloved Users?
Because it is truly the pride of our Customer Support heroes to help people embrace ClickUp every day, here’s how CS has helped customers overcome common challenges with adapting to a new—but a very awesome—platform.
- “Customers have the toughest time learning how to be confident in the vastness of ClickUp, but once they do, they love its full range of features, customizability, and having a Customer Support team right there with them to improve their processes!” —Jake Sines
- “Customers love our [user interface] and having so many of the tools they love and used to use in a bunch of different places, but all in one!” —Jacquie Lolong
- “Customers can sometimes have a tough time knowing how they can implement ClickUp to fit their super-specific use case. However, what they love the most is that we are there to help them through it, whatever it may be!” —Jen Roth
- “Customers LOVE our approach to customer service and our generous spirit! There are moments where finding that ideal Hierarchy is tricky at first, but we have the team and resources designed to help make your productivity dreams come true!” —Mandy Mekhail
- “Understandably, users have the toughest time simply getting started with a new ClickUp account. We have some really great templates, webinars, and onboarding docs to help ease that transition, but anything in its infancy is going to be tough—that’s why we call them growing ‘pains’! But honestly, once a customer gets started and begins using ClickUp day-to-day, they get the hang of it, feel more confident, and totally love it.” —Haven Soliman
There is so much that goes into excellent customer support that keeps customers coming back, but it all starts with empowering those users to ask for help whenever it’s needed. A fully-loaded platform and individuals who are passionate about providing assistance may set ClickUp’s CS team up for success, but simply reaching out is where it all begins.
So whether you need a leg-up to get started with the ClickUp app or would like a real human to help you tailor your Workspace to fit your specific needs, our Customer Support reps are here for you, with a smile, 24/7.
Related readings:
- How our product managers use ClickUp
- How our marketing team uses ClickUp
- How our onboarding team uses ClickUp
- How our quality excellence team uses ClickUp
- ClickUp best practices and getting started
- How to use ClickUp for Client Onboarding
Questions? Comments? Visit our Help Center for support.