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How Advanced Sports Media uses Glassboard

In our never-ending quest to talk to every single customer who uses Glassboard, we sometimes come across stories where people are using our service in a new and interesting way, or in a way that we hadn’t thought about before. This story is a little bit of both. Recently we talked to Ted Kasten, the CEO of Advanced Sports Media (the company behind ESPN’s Draft Analyzer software) about how they are using Glassboard to help with customer support.

To understand how they are using Glassboard, we first need to understand the context of how they are using it. The Fantasy Football Draft season is very short, lasting about two months leading up to the beginning of the NFL season. As Ted puts it, “The good news is that Draft Analyzer is a must-have for people putting together their Fantasy Football teams. The bad news is that they are doing it all at the same time.” During the peak sales season there are literally thousands of questions that come in at all hours of the day, especially nights and weekends when customers are at home. To handle the load, ASM hires several people in different time zones to answer the onslaught of feedback.

Ted and his team use an internal ticketing system to help manage support cases — but this system doesn’t provide for ad hoc questions for internal escalation: “It provides only a partial solution for us and actually ends up increasing our workloads as we spend more time managing the tickets than our customers.” And while ASM does their best to train their support people, there are always questions or situations that need escalation to the rest of the team. Many times it’s just a quick, “what do I do here,” but sometimes the escalation needs higher level customer service. As a result, ASM needed a system that could enable a fluid, ongoing dialog with the others on the team, or as Ted puts it, “a system that would make the dialog as fluent as if we were all in the same room at the same time.”

In the past, the company relied on email, but it wasn’t ideal. Of the many reasons why email doesn’t work, the most important is that email does not support the urgency or the focus needed to answer the escalations. Email also does not provide a central location for others to review, so when new employees came in there was no history to learn from. “We quickly became buried under hundreds of saved email threads from numerous recipients answering slightly different versions of the same questions.”

ASM also looked into chat services, but that required everyone to be online at the same time, so it was a non-starter. ASM needed an asynchronous communications service.

To make matters more difficult, all of the employees were off-site, so they needed a service that was cloud-based. And because of the nature of escalations on nights and weekends, they needed a system that could be easily accessed both from the web as well as from mobile devices, so that no matter where other team members were, they could be kept in the loop. “If a customer needs help for their fantasy football draft in a few hours or their money back, I need to get the answer to the support team immediately, not in a few hours when I check my email again. The Glassboard mobile app notifies me of the issue and I can respond as easily as replying to a text message.”

We’re honored that ASM has chosen Glassboard! Do you have an interesting way that you’re using Glassboard? Tell us about it! stories@glassboard.com

Posted by Walker Fenton