Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

In business and in life, making a decision is easy when you’re working with a true partner and together can weigh all the factors involved towards making the right decision. In a specific example, the same can be said when it comes to making decisions that impact your B2B customer support teams’ success. As a customer support leader, you have to make a million decisions a day, and many, if not most of them, involve helping to solve customer issues.

Texting is one of the most used forms of communication. In the United States alone, 5.5 billion text messages are sent daily. So maybe it’s not so much of a surprise that your customers want to be able to text your business when they need support. Few things are more frustrating than when you’re trying to solve a problem and just end up sitting on hold. And texting offers an alternative for you and your customers.

Sometime last year, we found the opportunity to optimize one of our critical API endpoints that was served using Ruby on Rails. This led to a series of investigations before we identified the right long-term solution for our particular use case. It required us not only to leverage a new JSON serializer, but also challenged us to build efficient caching and deployment strategies to go with it. This is the tale of how we embarked on that compelling journey and what we learned as a result.

For businesses of any size, consulting firms can help fill in gaps in the organization without having to build out a team or department themselves. The challenge for these firms is keeping track of all of their work across all of their clients. While it may be useful at times to have an overarching view of all work, the details can get lost easily. It is nearly always the case that certain clients will have requests that take precedence over others.