Freshdesk Alerts and Automations from Google Sheets for a Smooth Customer Experience

Google Sheets has emerged as an indispensable tool for modern operations teams, revolutionizing how tasks are managed, data is analyzed, and collaborations unfold within organizations. Its pivotal role stems from its versatility, offering a dynamic platform that enables seamless data organization, real-time collaboration, and powerful automation.

As a cloud-based spreadsheet software, Google Sheets empowers business operations teams to streamline workflows, make data-driven decisions, and foster enhanced team collaboration irrespective of geographical boundaries. Its accessibility, intuitive interface, and integration capabilities with other Google Workspace tools make it invaluable for optimizing operational efficiency, fostering transparency, and facilitating agile decision-making processes within today's dynamic and fast-paced business environments.

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Benefits of using Google Sheets for customer-facing teams

1. Centralized Data Management: Google Sheets allows customer-facing teams to centralize customer data, including contact information, interaction history, feedback, and support tickets. With a single repository, teams can access and update information collaboratively in real-time, ensuring everyone has the most current and accurate data.
2. Easy Collaboration and Sharing: With its cloud-based nature, Google Sheets facilitates seamless collaboration among team members. Multiple individuals can work on the same sheet simultaneously, share comments, and track changes, fostering teamwork and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
3. Customizable Reporting and Analysis: Customer support and success teams can leverage Google Sheets to create customized reports and analyze data using various built-in functions and formulas. This enables them to derive insights, identify patterns, and make data-driven decisions to improve service quality, identify trends, and forecast customer needs.

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Why using G-Sheets as a stand-alone product isn’t a great idea for customer-facing teams?

1. Complexity for Large Datasets: Handling large datasets in Google Sheets can be challenging. It might become difficult to go through rows and rows of data manually to find critical information.
2. Overlooking Critical Tasks: Relying solely on Google Sheets for managing Customer Experience (CX) tasks can inadvertently lead CX teams to overlook critical activities. Without a more automated system in place, CX teams may struggle to promptly address customer needs.
3. Being informed of issues: Teams cannot be notified when certain values breach thresholds and quick actions need to be enforced to bring them back within acceptable limits.

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Benefits of alerting and automation

1. Real-Time Response and Issue Resolution: Alerting and automation systems enable businesses to promptly identify and address issues as they arise, by setting up alerts for specific triggers or thresholds in data.
2. Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity: Automation streamlines repetitive tasks and workflows, and ensures that teams spend little to no time identifying problems and frees up time for more strategic tasks.
3. Improved Decision-Making and Insights: Alerting and automation systems facilitate data-driven decision-making by providing timely and accurate information. By leveraging automated data collection, analysis, and reporting, business teams gain access to real-time insights and trends.

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Use cases where customer-facing teams need to be alerted from G-Sheets

1. Renewal or Expiry Notifications: For customer success teams managing subscriptions or contracts, Google Sheets can contain information about renewal dates or contract expirations. Alerts can be set up to notify team members in advance of upcoming renewals or expirations, enabling proactive outreach to customers.
2. Customer Feedback Analysis: If customer support logs customer feedback or survey responses in Google Sheets, they can implement alerts based on the NPS rating that they have set, and proactively reach out to detractors to understand what went wrong.
3. Health Score Monitoring: When customer health scores go below a certain threshold potentially indicating low usage or an eventual churn, the customer success team can get notified via a ticket on Freshdesk to investigate the reasons for this.

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How does Locale.ai help?

Locale is an operations automation and issue-tracking solution, and mainly provides the following benefits to business operations teams:

1. Automating ticket creation: Support tickets on Freshdesk can be automatically created when a few rows on Google Sheets match the trigger filters that have been set up to alert CX teams.

2. Collaboration between different functions: Notifications through Locale can be sent out to multiple teams and stakeholders, and provide a one-stop shop for all information to be recorded and monitored.
3. Escalations and Auto-resolution: Locale automatically escalates tickets that have been open for a long time to their respective stakeholders, and also auto-resolves incidents that do not match the trigger conditions any longer.

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How to set up an alert on Locale.ai?

Step 1: Connect a Google Sheet

Connecting to Google Sheets is a quick 5-minute integration where we add a link to the Google Sheet, and choose which worksheet needs to be added as the data source on Locale, and voila! We are ready to set up alerts :)

Locale can also integrate with your database or data warehouse to send out alerts! Find out more here!

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Step 2: Set up Alert Configurations

In this step, we set rules to monitor the data. This starts with a SQL query or adding filters. Once you do this, you’ll be able to receive the results of the query or filter at a set frequency.  

Playbooks can be set to ensure faster resolution, and automatic resolution can be enabled to ensure incidents on Locale are resolved with zero manual intervention, once they move out of the queue on your data source!

Dynamic stakeholder assignments are possible for larger teams. Incidents can be configured to have labels, escalations, and playbooks to ensure adherence.

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Step 3: Notify CX teams via Freshdesk!

Connect with Freshdesk to ensure that your CX team receives any critical information as support tickets that they can work on. Group your notifications to ensure end users don’t get spammed and yet receive all the incidents that they need to prioritize and work on.

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You’re good to go! Once the alert is set, incidents will start flowing in when there are new rows identified in your datasource!

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Learn more on how to automate ticket creation with Freshdesk: How to Automate Ticket Creation on Freshdesk with Locale

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Conclusion

While Google Sheets, as a standalone product exhibits limitations, its integration with a robust alerting tool like Locale significantly enhances its utility for teams in optimizing business operations. Locale's alerting capabilities complement Google Sheets by providing real-time notifications, data monitoring, and automated alerts, empowering teams to mitigate errors promptly, streamline workflows, and ultimately improve overall business operations efficiency. Together, this integration harnesses the collaborative and data management strengths of Google Sheets while addressing its limitations, creating a more efficient and responsive environment for teams to thrive.

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Excited to get started? It takes less than 10 minutes to get all things set up: Try for free