How we work: Asana + Desk.com to keep you running

If you’ve ever written to Asana with a question, or asked for help using a new feature, it’s likely one of our friendly UO (User Operations) team members personally responded to you. Our User Operations team (often referred to at other companies as ‘customer operations’ or ‘support’) prides itself on a thoughtful, timely, and user-first approach to work. We keep up with thousands of tickets, while maintaining a consistent feedback loop between customers and engineers, to enhance the product you use every day.

We recently shared some insights with Desk.com about ways a small team can provide support to a large customer base. Here’s a closer look at how we support you, using Asana.

Keeping your team running

We maintain several projects in Asana as a team

Our User Ops project is the main hub for team communication. In it, we flag tasks such as open questions, action items, and product opportunities we want to file, but aren’t ready to share with the entire company.

We track all out of office requests in Asana

Despite being a small team, we still have to be available to our users. To ensure we can plan ahead if a teammate is out, we create a reference task with the details about teammates’ days off. This way, we can view them on an Asana Calendar. We also add these dates to our weekly meeting agenda.

We maintain our weekly team meeting agenda project

Each team goal lives in our weekly agenda as a reference task so we know that all our work is consistently aligned with our top-level goals. Team members are encouraged to add agenda topics prior to the meeting to help us stay on track. We also rotate meeting owners to give everyone a chance to experience leading a team; this person is responsible for the week’s agenda. Tabled agenda items we might want to revisit are moved to a section called ‘Future,’ so there’s always a history of what’s been discussed.

We have a Section called “Reference/Answers to tricky user questions”

This is where team members regularly add examples of difficult questions, interesting workarounds, or ways to use Asana. This is a great way to avoid duplicating work and is a helpful resource for both new hires and existing team members.

We have a project for peer ticket reviews.

In order to continually improve our processes, we do peer reviews of responses to customers. This exercise ensures that our response quality is high, the information we’re providing is accurate, and we can hone in on opportunities for growth. These reviews are private tasks, but the collective learnings are housed in a project that the whole team can reference.

Transferring knowledge from users to Asanas

By using Asana together with Desk.com, we communicate directly with users, capture questions and feedback, and provide responses in a timely manner. We track feedback and issues in Asana, which makes sharing your questions with other Asana teams simple. Read more about how we use Desk and Asana together on the Desk blog.

We share customer feedback with engineers

We do this by filing user-reported bugs in Asana. Once a Desk.com ticket hits a certain threshold — when multiple users report the same problem — we file a bug in the Bugs project in Asana, which is shared with the entire Asana team and maintained by the Engineering team. Once there’s a resolution, we can follow up with the user immediately by clicking from the Asana task to Desk.com.

The questions and feedback you send to UO are often seen immediately by our Engineering team, due to the feedback loop and transparency we’ve created using Asana.

We build new Asana features based on your feedback.

Your feedback is invaluable to Asana’s product team. We pull reports from Desk to share information like top feature requests in Asana, and many of the requests heard by UO often turn into features. Examples of features created as a result of this process include Calendars and subtasks.

We help teams upgrade

We frequently receive requests from teams who want to upgrade their team to the premium version of Asana. We pass those requests off to the Sales team in Asana.

Together, Asana and Desk allow us to constantly improve the timeliness and quality of interactions with you, and all teams using Asana.

For more ideas about how to deliver support, even when you have a small team, check out our post on Desk.com’s blog. If you want to join the UO team to help Asana users get the most out of the product, we’re hiring!

Josh Torres is a member of Asana’s User Operations team.