Customer Engagement as a competitive advantage with Zendesk

For the past 40 years, our customer was a retailer on a prominent London street and moved their business online around a one year ago, in what originally seemed to be a success story in terms of acquiring new customers and repeat business. However, the move online was more challenging than what they had been expecting, beyond the creation of an online store which was quite straight-forward. Besides having to contend with the added complexities of order and inventory management that online retailers face, customer support issues became the main challenge, leading to a situation where employees and management were fire-fighting daily to try and keep the situation under control.

All the tell-tale signs of a customer support system which was failing were there. Customer queries were taking long to be resolved, if at all. First call resolution rates and other customer support productivity metrics were plummeting. Customer support agents were experiencing burn-out. Customers who had been waiting too long to get an answer were using more than one channel to get through, which made the situation even worse. And all this was spilling over to the social media.

Cleverbit Software was approached with the brief of helping the business take control of the slipping customer support function. After discovery sessions with the main players, and a review of the current system and processes as well as possible alternatives, a decision was taken to use Zendesk.

“It all happened in a matter of days, rather than weeks. It took longer for us to accept that we had a problem which could spell the end of our business that had been in operation for all these years. We came across a blog post from Cleverbit Software which was talking about the exact problems we were encountering and how they could help businesses in this situation regain control of the customer support processes. “

“Rather than simply suggesting from the start that Zendesk would be the solution, as other consultants specialised on Zendesk would do, they took time to understand how we operate and the systems we use to first determine the solution that was required. Once we all agreed that in our case Zendesk would be the best solution, they got us up and running in a matter of hours!”

“Today we are in a situation where our customer service is not only not our Achilles heel, but is the main factor which distinguishes our business from our competitors.”