Running a customer support team

The Basecamp support team is a fully remote team that spans seven time zones and helps our customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

With a very distributed team, it’s tough to get everyone on the same page. It can be even harder to keep them there. The tools inside our team project ensures that everyone has answers to questions like “What are the common cases we’ve seen this week?” or “Where’s the outline for our online classes?”

Here's an insider's look at how our team uses Basecamp to stay organized.

Jump to:

• Chatting with the team
• Posting updates
• Creating space with the Calendar
• Checking in without meetings
• Organizing resources
• Tracking work across teams

Chatting with the team

With our team entirely remote, it helps to have a place to chat in real time.

The Chat tool gives everyone a place to talk instantly about anything. It’s where the team goes to ask others about a particularly interesting customer email. Or share the latest Taylor Swift music video. We've even had some fun GIF battles there. As shifts come online and then sign off at the end of the day, there's a flurry of hellos and goodbyes. It’s a powerful tool for making sure that your team feels connected, even if they are on the other side of the planet.

Posting updates

While Chat is great for those real time chats, it’s not designed to be an all-day meeting. For updates and other messages that the entire team need to see, we use the Message Board. 

Instead of that message being lost in the never-ending conveyor belt of a chat, it’s right there on the Message Board. 

Creating space with the Calendar

Any events related to the team go on the Calendar. These events can be customer trainings or calls, our regular 1:1s, and time off for vacation or appointments.

We also schedule time to work on side projects or anything else that takes us out of our email queue. By putting time out of emails on the Calendar, there's space for everyone to work on a range of projects. Without that space, a support team could quickly end up as queue monkeys racing through email after email.

Checking in without meetings

We don't need status meetings because we've got something better — Automatic check-ins.

With the Automatic Check-in tool, we regularly ask everyone on the team a few things. The check-in allows us to talk about questions like “What was a common issue that you saw this week?” or "What's a a great support tip to share with the team?"

Organizing resources

The Docs and Files tool gets a lot of use. It’s the go-to place for files, the online class resources, customer ideas, and anything else the team might need. Everything’s organized by topics using the folder option. And a few of those folders include Readme docs to give a person the gist of that folder and how to use it.

Tracking work across teams

When a customer reaches out with an issue, we'll first troubleshoot to see if they've encountered a bug. After it's confirmed, we'll rope in the programming team to help by adding a Card to the "Bug" Card Table inside our "Basecamp Web" project.

The first stop for every new bug is the “Triage” column. This gives us an easy place to quickly add new bugs. The Card name is kept short for easy reference. The notes field contains any details, screenshots, links back to the case, and anything else that might be helpful.

From the “Triage” list, the bug is then either assigned or grabbed by a programmer who sees one they want to fix. Here’s a full thread where a bug was added as a card by Joan (from the support team), discussed between a programmer and product designer, and then fixed:

Since Joan was the creator of the Card, they were automatically notified throughout the process so they could keep the customer in the loop.