POMS Corp., a provider of manufacturing execution systems software for companies that make pharmaceuticals, bio-pharmaceutical, cell and gene therapy, and other FDA-regulated products, takes customer support seriously. After years of frustration with an insufficient customer support solution, Travis Castleman, VP of Customer Support at POMS, decided to adopt TeamSupport in 2020.
Three years later, with a robust knowledge base and a streamlined, customizable ticketing system, the company has been able to deliver faster, more effective support to customers with even the most complex technical issues. After implementing TeamSupport, the POMS team has:
- Maintained a customer satisfaction rating of 96%
- Reduced ticket volume by 10%
- Achieved 75% of total support requests coming in through TeamSupport
The Challenge
When Castleman joined POMS Corp. in 2016, his team was still using a shared inbox through a CRM as the primary mode of communication with customers. Support requests were often buried and lost, multiple agents would inadvertently reply to the same ticket—or worse, the ticket would go unanswered. This disorganized way of working made it difficult for agents to meet their SLAs, let alone handle complex customer issues.
Castleman knew his team needed a better, more modernized ticketing system, as well as a searchable knowledge base that could help customers find their own solutions to common problems. In 2020, POMS ultimately became the fifth entity under the Constellation Software umbrella to adopt TeamSupport.
The Solution
POMS implemented TeamSupport In October 2020. The initial goal was to increase efficiency with a purpose-built ticketing system, but over time, the team also helped customers become more self-sufficient with a more robust, useful knowledge base.
Castleman and his team immediately found value in TeamSupport’s customizable ticket fields, which help ensure that support agents have access to the information necessary to tackle even the most complex problems.
“The ability to customize is huge for us—it allows us to do what makes sense for us and our evolving needs,” Castleman says.
He says he also appreciates the ability to visualize the status of all open tickets within TeamSupport’s dashboard and to automatically generate and send ticket reports. “I basically live on TeamSupport’s main ticket view page and the dashboard—both go a long way in helping us not lose track of anything,” he says.
TeamSupport’s automation also helps optimize their work. “We have automatic alerts set up to let us know if a ticket is going stale, so we don’t miss our initial SLA response time. Those reminders are beneficial to help us keep things moving along.”
The team has also ramped up its knowledge base, giving customers the ability to find information quickly and easily on their own without necessarily having to wait for a support agent. “Our old knowledge base didn’t have a lot of content, wasn’t user friendly, and search and reporting capabilities were limited,” Castleman says. After implementing TeamSupport, Castleman took a “If you build it, they will come” approach. His team quickly expanded the knowledge base by creating and adding as much content as possible. And it worked.
“Before TeamSupport, we had about 20-40 logins to our knowledge base per month,” he said. After TeamSupport was implemented, that number increased to 300-400 logins per month. And in 2023, that number increased to an average of 800 per month.
“I cannot stress how much of an asset the knowledge base has become for us and the positive impact it had towards ticket reduction – even with a growing customer base,” Castleman says. “So much so that we put a knowledge base program together with a designated person to oversee its maintenance.”
The Results
Castleman says that he and the POMS support team were impressed by how easy it was to switch to TeamSupport. “I was surprised at how easy onboarding was from start to finish,” Castleman says. Alfredo Cabero, Team Lead at POMS, commented, “I was initially nervous about switching ticketing systems, but looking back now, I question how we lived without TeamSupport.”
Three years into using the software, POMS Corp. is still seeing positive usage trends. Thanks to the expanded knowledge base, POMS has seen a reduced ticket volume, even with an expanded customer base. According to Castleman, total ticket volume is projected to decrease by roughly 10% from 2022 to 2023, which is increasing each agent’s capacity to support a growing number of customers.
He attributes this directly to the growth of their knowledge base, which has grown to 600 articles with an average of 800 page views per month. “Thanks to TeamSupport, we can see which customers are viewing knowledge base articles and we can determine how many tickets reference a KB article,” Castleman notes. That data helps him assess how useful knowledge base content is and understand how many tickets are likely being deflected because a user was able to find the solution on their own.
When they do need to submit tickets, the majority of POMS customers are gravitating toward the portal rather than submitting email requests, saving the team time and effort. In 2022, 67% of support requests came through via the TeamSupport customer hub, and that number increased to 75% in 2023.
Looking ahead, Castleman says he plans to increase the use of automation in TeamSupport by segmenting support tickets by product and type of issue. He is also exploring the possibility of adding Messaging & Live Chat to address roughly 10% of tier 1 customer support questions and remove some burden from his support team.
“In my 20+ years in customer service I’ve worked with a variety of ticketing systems, but TeamSupport has been my favorite,” Castleman says.