Hi, I work for a company that provides flexible technology applications and customer service solutions for our clients. We utilize use voice, chat, e-mail, and self-help options for there customers. In addition we also have started deploying home agents. How can Basecamp help a company focused on customer service, operate more efficiently? How will it enable our Operations Department to communicate more effectively between Human Resources or Workforce Management?

No.

Take a look at salesforce.com or zoho.com they have a nice online CRM too, maybe you find something usefull for you there.

Reo – your situation sounds similar to a company with whom I previously worked. In that environment, we did use Basecamp on a limited basis for some product development efforts, and it was fairly successful as a straightforward way to track assignments and story requests.

Do you have more ideas on the specific kinds of problems you are hoping to solve with Basecamp? It seems like one of your ideas is to improve communication between departments. I think Basecamp is useful here in the way it provides 100% internal visiblity, wherein each user in a company can see the same information. There are other tools that can help in this regard as well, such as www.quickbase.com. Good luck!

I am really looking at how we can improve day to day communication between our departments, and improve operating efficiency. My company has taken some steps to improve things, like reducing the amount of paperwork that our Ops department has to deal with by moving to a web based platform. Though in areas like reporting, it has been an absolute nightmare for months. We implemented a home based program over a month ago, but we have had little support in actually running it. We have just “written our own rules” and tried to do the best we could. I really love my job and my company but I am trying to find a way to make a positive impact. I appreciate any ideas or suggestions you might have. Thanks.

And we actually do use quickbase, to grade and track our customer reps interactions.

Reo – for your situation, Basecamp may help. The to-do lists could be useful for documenting requests and making sure they are assigned to somebody, even people in other departments. You may also want to look at the writeboard functionality, which could help with your situation for home agent reporting. I assume you are at a point where it would really help to document and agree on some requirements, so you can get the support you need. Antother tool I am familiar with for managing requirements is JIRA; you may want to check around to see if other people in your company are familiar with it.

Ultimately, Basecamp is only one of many tools which could be helpful. It’s easy to use, so it has the advantage of being useful almost immediately after you set up your account. Just be careful to use a tool for solving an underlying business problem. From what you’ve described, you may first want to address the business problem of how departments are able to work together, or how information gets communicated. If you can get a small team of people to agree on how to solve some of these problems, I think your tool implementation will go more smoothly.