Many customers have had the experience at least once. You call a company with a question and get a perfectly polite person on the other end who says “sorry, I can’t help you with that, let me transfer you.” The next person you talk to says the same thing. And maybe even the one after that.

Many factors are involved in creating an effective customer service strategy. The agents you hire, the support platform you use, and the internal resources you provide your team, can all have a significant impact on the level of service your customers receive. But while most business owners are aware of these major factors, there’s one that is often overlooked – Collaboration.

Too often, businesses don’t place enough value on building positive relationships with their customers. The term itself, “positive relationship”, is a bit generic and isn’t exactly easy to quantify. This means it’s often a factor many businesses ignore and takes on a lower priority over time.

From the beginning, we have aimed to help distributed teams work as if they were sitting in the same room. Through our journey, we discovered that the whiteboard was at the center of a lot of team ceremonies—a place where people would gather around, share their ideas, express themselves and solve big challenges. We called our product RealtimeBoard—this name was direct and defined a brand-new category of collaboration tools which help teams to align around a shared vision in real time.

We’re living in the era of instant gratification. The realm of customer support is no exception. Customers today expect companies to respond to their queries or complaints almost as soon as a ticket is raised, and demand a quick resolution of the issue. In fact, the First Response Rate is now increasingly gaining importance as companies are beginning to see the kind of positive impact it has on customer satisfaction.