Guest post by our pal Brad Barrish from Topspin Media
Topspin is the premier direct-to-consumer solution for music artists, filmmakers, comedians, writers and anyone else who might want to sell stuff directy to their fans. We work with all types of artists, across many genres and of all sizes. Trent Reznor, Beastie Boys, Madi Diaz, Dillinger Escape Plan, Paul McCartney, Andrew Bird, Umphrey’s McGee, Kevin Smith and Ron White are just a few of the thousands of talented folks with whom we work. In addition to helping them utilize the platform, we often interact directly with their fans. We want to make sure we’re doing everything possible to ensure that their fans have a great experience. That’s where Olark comes in.
We had been considering the idea of binging live chat capabilities to the Topspin platform for some time. Late last year we decided to test Olark on a campaign that we did with a little band called Pixies. Maybe you’ve heard of them? We did a blog post that detailed the campaign. Because the band was offering a very limited amount of tickets to their fans, we wanted to make sure that any customers that had an issue could get their questions answered immediatley. Additionally, we wanted to make sure that chats were logged in Zendesk, which we use for all Artist and Fan Support inquiries. Olark was a simple, straightforward solution for customers and it proved to be very effective for this campaign.
Due to the great experience we had with Olark on the Pixies campaign, we decided to use it on a few other select campaigns like Smashing Pumpkins and Justin Bieber.
Complete Topspinmedia Pixes blog post
In addition to utilizing Olark to help the fans of our clients, we’ve also implemented it for our own clients, which means it’s directly integrated with the Topspin application for our Plus and Enterprise customers. This allows them to reach someone quicker when they have an urgent issue. On average we see between 5-10 chat requests per day from the Topspin application with an average of 11 messages exchanged versus an average of 20 artist support tickets per day created on Zendesk. We have seen the number of tickets go down since we implemented Olark, but if anything we are spending more time on artist support overall, which is fine. We would rather spend a little more time and have very happy clients. We measure satisfaction via Zednesk and our satisfaction rating for Artist Support is 96%.
Thanks to our Olark integrations, we’re able to serve our clients and their customers faster and provide a better customer support experience all around.