Mariner Software needed a platform to efficiently solve inquiries

The Challenge

Mariner Software started out in 1990 as a small, two-person operation based in a garage. The company started out selling just two Mac titles, but over the next two decades, it developed and acquired a wide range of products aimed at the home user market.

Today, Mariner offers 14 titles, including the MacGourmet recipe management application, a Paperless digital filing system, and numerous creative writing tools, including Montage for screenwriters and StoryMill for novelists.

With an install base in the hundreds of thousands on three operating systems, Mariner needed a more efficient way to handle technical support.

The Solution

Until four years ago, Mariner was handling its tech support through email.

Mike Wray, President of Mariner, explains: “That was a nightmare. It got to the point where it was just overwhelming because we couldn’t centralize a support thread. It would get spread out and people would email in for support. We’d respond back and then they might send in a new email. It was tough to merge all the threads going at one time.”

As a virtual company with a distributed team across many locations, Mariner wanted a Cloud helpdesk solution.

Mariner looked at five or six helpdesk solutions before settling on Deskpro. According to Mike Wray, Mariner “ultimately landed on Deskpro because of how simple it was to use and configure”.

The Benefits

With Deskpro, all of Mariner’s incoming emails are turned into tickets. Mariner’s process is to triage unassigned tickets and assign them to the customer representative who’s best placed to solve the problem. Some tickets may be simple customer service issues, like retrieving a serial number, whereas others need to be handled by a rep with the most detailed knowledge of the specific product.

When users submit multiple tickets about the same problem, Mariner uses Deskpro’s merge feature to create a single ticket, reducing the cases where two different reps end up working with the same customer.

Because Mariner’s customer base skews towards older home users who may not be as computer literate as the typical “techie,” providing clear, detailed instructions is important. Mariner’s staff have used Deskpro’s Knowledgebase feature to build up a library of over 500 articles.

“We’re always referring people to the Knowledgebase,” explains Mike Wray, “just simply for the fact that there are many, many answers to the questions that they are typically sending into us where instead of reinventing the wheel and taking five minutes out to type out a note to them, we’ll refer them over to a specific article that might help them understand exactly what they’re after.”

Mariner’s reps use Deskpro’s snippets feature to quickly add links to relevant articles when replying to customers.

The Future

Using Deskpro, Mariner has been able to keep the support team ultra-effective as it grows. All of Mariner’s staff start their day by logging in to Deskpro, Mike Wray explains:

“After four years, we’ve come to understand that Deskpro is an integral part of our processes for everybody here. The whole team uses Deskpro every day to help support our customers and improve our service to clients.”

“This is our way of keeping a finger on the pulse of the public. Within Deskpro, we can figure out pretty damn quickly that maybe there’s something that a new operating system update broke in our product that we need to get on ASAP. Deskpro has really helped us pinpoint where problems might be happening.”