How TestBox Makes Buying Support Software Easier

No one is ever excited about buying software. Every day, we hear from people telling us how much they dread having to evaluate and purchase new software. It’s not a simple process, it’s far from transparent, it can be lengthy, and it’s often inefficient.

Here at TestBox, we’re trying to turn the software buying process from something dreaded into something that’s enjoyable. Imagine, no more sales calls, spinning up countless trial environments, or having to wrangle all your stakeholders — just an easy and convenient way to compare software side-by-side in a live environment. As one of our users told us, “it even starts to feel fun with TestBox because I'm back in control and able to go at my own pace!”

In this post, we’ll share six things that make buying Customer Support software painful and how TestBox will help simplify and improve your software evaluation process.

1. Setting up a sales call takes so long

We’re all familiar with how long it takes to set up a sales call. You:

1. Fill out a form on a website.
2. Wait for someone to respond.
3. Email them back and forth.
4. They ask you for your availability to jump on a call.
5. And then, assuming you can get a call in a timely manner, you find yourself shifting other meetings to make it work.

Solution: A self-serve onboarding process

At TestBox, we appreciate that you want to dive right into evaluating your software quickly. That’s why we've made our onboarding process self-serve. After you tell us a little bit about what you’re looking for, you can immediately get started. There’s no calendar roulette, no emails back-and-forth, just a simple automated service that gets you set up as quickly as possible.

Note that right now, because we’ve just launched, we’re offering every new user a brief 15 minute walk-through call to make sure you can navigate our product and to answer any of your questions live. We promise that this process will be fully automated very soon.

2. Trial environments are too barebones 

As you progress deeper into the software selection process and set up trials for the products you’re considering (assuming a trial is even available), you’ll notice that the trial environments initially look very empty. Without any data, how can you even test if the features work? How will you know if this is the right piece of software for your team?

Most of the time, trials require starting from scratch. Even worse, you’re the one who has to figure out how to import data from your current system — a process that typically takes hours, if not days, and often relies on support from other teams in your company. Then, once your data is loaded, you still have to set up all the configurations, recreating your most commonly used automations, adding canned responses to common customer questions, or entering knowledge base articles.

Solution: Preloaded data and common configurations

None of these things are an issue with TestBox. In our customer support setup today:

• TestBox environments come populated with data like you’d see in a typical setup. Using GPT-3, we generated tons of customer support tickets that a B2B SaaS business would see. Over time, we’ll be extending our dataset to include tickets relevant to other industries so that your experience within TestBox is even more customizable and realistic.
• We’ve already set up the most common configurations for customer support use cases, as well as sample automations, triggers, canned responses, and even a couple of knowledge base articles.
• We’ve put the same data and configurations into each product environment, so that you get the best apples-to-apples comparison experience.

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3. Learning several solutions at once is a lot of work

It’s difficult to assess how well a software solution might work for your team without actually knowing how it works. We know that as you jump into the evaluation process, you’re probably considering multiple options. This means that you or others on your team are taking the time to read how-to articles and googling for answers to all sorts of questions in order to learn each piece of software.

Solution: Guided walkthroughs

With TestBox, there’s no need to spend hours trying to understand how each solution works. We’ve included guided walk-throughs for the most common customer support use cases. Simply click into a product, pick a use case you want to learn, turn on guided walk-throughs, sit back and relax. Our instructions and helpful pointers will get you up to speed in no time.

There’s also no need to delegate one solution to each person on your team to learn, before you bring everyone back together for a product-by-product masterclass. With TestBox, you can all dive into several products at once and have the same experience.

4. Keeping everything organized is no easy task

Testing several solutions at once typically means keeping lots of browser tabs open. You might have several spreadsheets to consolidate or be using some other labor-intensive method of notetaking.

Solution: Compare software solutions in a single tab

All of this disappears with TestBox.

• Your products are all within one tab so it’s very easy to stay organized.
• Your notes are automatically categorized by product and use case.
• There’s a notebook that you can export for sharing notes with others on your team.
• For each use case, you can rate ease-of-use and how well it meets your needs, indicate your favorite and least favorite features, and note any other commentary, reactions, or questions.

Right now, we’re working on building extra capabilities into the notebook, including the ability to comment and share with others on your team (and view others’ notes), as well as a summary view that will show your top rated products by use case and let you rank use cases in order of importance.

5. Convincing all your stakeholders can be an Olympian feat

Behind every software decision, there’s a chorus of voices and opinions. Your team members, the leadership team, and other folks all want to provide their input and need to be convinced that you’re making the right choice.

Solution: Involve stakeholders from the beginning

Using TestBox, which shines in this area, you can invite other stakeholders into the testing process to see it for themselves. We really believe that nothing beats first-hand experience. Using TestBox, you can all try out the various use cases and see how the software stacks up side by side.

Remember too, making the right decision today means less risk of having to spend more time and money down the road.  

6. Risking a privacy or security breach is a real concern 

We know that trying something new can be unnerving and cause for concern on the security front.

Solution: Best-in-class security practices

At TestBox, we take your security and privacy very seriously. The software product instances that you’re evaluating in TestBox are live, production versions. That means your data is treated just as if you were using a live instance hosted by one of our partners.

We only collect information about you during onboarding for two reasons: to register the products you’re testing with our partners and to enable us to better customize your TestBox environment.

To mitigate the risk of any sort of cyber breach, we take the following measures:

• All infrastructure and product-related secrets are stored in a secure, encrypted vault.
• We enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) where possible.
• We only grant permissions to individuals and infrastructure on a case-by-case basis.
• We actively discuss how to manage security and privacy, considering security best practices, and how to avoid phishing and other types of personnel attacks.

If you’d like to know more about our best-in-class security practices, check out our Security FAQ page.

At TestBox, our goal is to take the pain out of the software evaluation process. We want to make it as quick and easy for you as possible, so you can rest assured that you’re finding the best software solution for your team and stay focused on your business priorities. Sign up today and take TestBox for a test drive.