How start-ups use Avenue to centralize and manage customer inbounds

Aug 9, 2023

As startups grow, it is imperative that they maintain a strong grasp on all customer messages. Customer messages arrive through various channels, including email, Intercom, live meetings, and Slack. To streamline and monitor these messages effectively, having a single source of truth is crucial. With the utilization of Avenue's form monitors, companies can systematically log all customer inquiries, particularly those concerning bugs, feature requests, and customer questions. We interviewed a B2B SaaS customer to understand how they leverage Avenue to centralize and monitor all incoming customer communications.

Avenue form monitors for centralized alerting

Our customer identified four common types of customer inquiries across different channels: bugs, feature requests, premier support, and customer education. With an Avenue form monitor, the customer created a customized form for the customer success team to initiate within Slack whenever a customer inquiry arises. Submitting the form triggers an Avenue ticket that is appropriately tagged for the corresponding team. Distinct automations are applied based on these four options:

Bugs initiate linear tickets
Feature Requests generate entries in the "Feature Request" Notion database
Customer Education inbounds generate entries in the “New Documentation Request" Notion database and assign a member of the CX team to answer the customers question
Premier Support needs lead to entries in the "Premier Support" database in Notion

Prioritization and Escalation in One View

The team utilizes the signals view, which provides an overview of all submitted tickets, to effectively manage and make sense of all ongoing customer inquiries. On a daily basis, the CX team triages tasks based on their urgency. Through Avenue, they can trigger actions such as creating a linear ticket or escalating an issue to the relevant audience. For instance, if a bug remains unanswered for more than 24 hours, the engineering manager receives an Avenue alert via Slack. Additionally, the team can oversee all communication related to each ticket within Avenue, ensuring synchronization with messages in connected tools like Slack and Linear.

Analyzing customer inbounds using Avenue’s signal view

Weekly, the CX team provides a report to the company around the types of customer inbounds coming in. The team uses the signals view to report out on the volume of issues, SLA’s, and the types of issues encountered. These reports guide their priorities for the upcoming week. For instance, if a majority of incoming tickets pertain to customer education, they recognize the need to allocate more time towards creating documentation for frequently occurring issues. At the end of each quarter, the product team is uses this data as an input for product planning – what were the most common types of bugs and feature requests?