Reduced Contact Rate

Evidence and data. With Zendesk, interviewees experienced declining contact per order rates — the ratio of customer inquiries to transactions — and described how Zendesk’s knowledge base enabled their teams to publish and optimize self-help content, which proactively reduced inquiry volume. In addition, insights from Zendesk’s reporting helped teams identify the root causes of customer contact and translate those patterns into actionable improvements across products, processes, and the overall customer experience. The director of e-commerce customer experience, payments, and fraud in the retail industry remarked: “What is so key about reporting is understanding inquiry trends. With Zendesk, you understand customer trends. What is bothering customers? When a customer contacts you, what is the intent?” Understanding the data unlocked interviewees’ ability to get ahead of the trends.

There were several ways Zendesk helped interviewees reduce the contact per order rate:

• Provided customer self-help. Most directly, Zendesk enabled interviewees to identify customer pain points and intent more accurately, then provided the ability to create systems, such as help centers, to address issues proactively. The director of e-commerce customer experience, payments, and fraud in the retail industry said, “We increased the ability to share product knowledge across product selection and match needs to product. Redoing our help center with Zendesk resulted in a massive change. That was the first step — to publish self-help content. We further reduced contact per order through intentional design to direct people to self-help. If we’re better able to understand customer intent and serve them relevant information, then we’re able to reduce our contact volume.”

• Uncovered new opportunities for customer experience or connection. The insights generated by Zendesk led to experience improvements and a more efficient ecosystem of tools to elevate customer experience. The director of e-commerce customer experience, payments, and fraud in the retail industry described an example: New loyalty program members receive a welcome email series that begins with a congratulatory email followed by an email with a promotional code. The lapse between these two emails drove a high volume of customer contact. She said: “That trend became visible to us, and so we asked our email marketing team to combine the emails. We were also able to identify large volumes around incorrectly entered promo codes, which made the codes look invalid and resulted in increased customer contact volumes. So Zendesk actually pointed us to opportunities by making that pattern visible. Then, we could go back to our team, ask to look at e-commerce platforms that autoapply promo codes, and begin to test them. We saw greater redemption and fewer customer contacts, as well as higher customer satisfaction in general.”

• Contributed to improved products. The insights generated led to product improvements that resulted in fewer complaints and propensities to exchange or refund. The technical program director in the health and wellness industry said: “We also improved our product to reduce the contact rate. So we are increasing awareness with the help center, but we are also improving the product itself. Once I understand all the customer contact reasons, I present them to the product development team. So I know I see a particular product has resulted in 3% growth in contact volume in the past two weeks compared to prior weeks. We now have the opportunity to ask, is there room to improve the product to avoid this contact reason? If yes, we proceed with innovating quickly. If not, I will implement some generative reply deflection while the product team develops a solution. So we balance the volume not only with self-help and deflection but also product improvements.”
  
  The senior vice president of digital operations in broadcast said: “Using Zendesk definitely resulted in improved efficiency in our products because we’re able to now provide actual evidence of when we have a bug. Listeners report that to us. We can say we’ve got X number of reports of a bug we can replicate ourselves. Here’s the data that goes along with that. We can help support our own teams to prioritize the focus on the product development side. It could be as simple as a bug, or it could be that we made changes to our product and everyone is complaining because we removed a feature, so maybe we should revisit that decision. We’re able to be very nimble because we can see trends and get immediate feedback. We can take the data back to our development and tech chains so that they can address whatever that issue might be or make product decisions based on feedback. We have more agility and efficiency, and we avoid that volume in the future.”

Several interviewees quantified their reduced contact rates:

• The vice president in the e-commerce industry said, “With Zendesk, our contact rate per order has decreased by about 36% in the past five years.”

• The technical program director in the health and wellness industry said: “We have three personas: clients that are enterprise companies, the subscribers, and our partners. I will speak of our subscribers, which is the largest part of our business. This month, for each thousand subscribers, only 13 opened a ticket. So our contact rate is 13. Just last year, we were almost at 21. We are continuing to reduce this every month, and we see a noticeable reduction in tickets month to month.”

• The director of e-commerce customer experience, payments, and fraud in the retail industry said: “We were able to reduce our contact per order rate significantly. It was 35% to 40% when I started. And now, we’re consistently around 16% for contact per order. We’ve gotten extremely efficient.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite has 10 million transactions in Year 1, which increase 10% each year.

• Its contact to order rate is 30%, resulting in 3 million tickets in Year 1, which increase 10% each year.

• With Zendesk, the composite uses insight generation to reduce customer support load per order by 15% in Year 1, 20% in Year 2, and 25% in Year 3.

• The average cost of inquiry if handled by a human agent was $5.61.

• It is likely that 50% of eliminated inquiries would have required overtime.

Risks. The impact of this benefit will vary among organizations based on the following factors:

• The volume and type of contacts in the prior environment.

• The organization’s prior solution and its capabilities.

• The organization’s help center comprehensiveness and degree of Zendesk adoption.

• The cost to handle an inquiry before Zendesk.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $10.3 million.

Additional Profit

Evidence and data. In addition to reducing the contact rate, product improvements unlocked with insights from Zendesk resulted in increased revenue. Zendesk’s proactive messaging functionalities also notably contributed to increased revenue:

• The vice president in the e-commerce industry said: “Zendesk powers a couple of our proactive shopping assistants. With large purchases, like computers or installed air conditioning, people don’t necessarily know what they want, or maybe they don’t understand the specs. And so they interact with proactive messaging that Zendesk provides. Those chats are fed into the CRM. That does a lot for us in those business spaces, which have quadrupled their conversion rates because of proactive messaging, so that’s a 4% revenue increase for us in those spaces.”

• Zendesk also empowered organizations to reduce the number of returns and refunds. With negative customer experiences that result in full refunds, the organization incurs the operational cost of serving customers but gains none of the revenue. The vice president in the e-commerce industry explained: “We now have SLA management that empowers the customer experience and journey, and we can let the customer know what we’re doing to rectify the issue. Everyone loves a comeback story. So we go from being this villain who gave them a poor experience to this hero who figured it out. That’s significant, because imagine losing even 0.1% of your customers every month. That’s not trivial.”

• Interviewees said that transcript reviews and quality assurance with Zendesk allowed them to identify when issues were related to new product launches and proactively work to course correct and resolve points of friction for smoother conversions.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• It increases transactions due to proactive messaging and product improvements by 0.25% in Year 1, 0.5% in Year 2, and 1% in Year 3.

• The average order value is $150.

• The operating profit margin is 10%.

Risks. The impact of this benefit will vary among organizations based on the following factors:

• The influence of the economic landscape.

• The organization’s roadmap and product improvement prioritization.

• The organization’s average order value.

• The organization’s use of Zendesk’s proactive messaging capabilities.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2 million.

Automated Resolution

Evidence and data. Interviewees described how multiple Zendesk AI capabilities, including AI agents and AI-powered generative replies, enabled their organizations to resolve a portion of customer inquiries automatically without requiring human agent intervention. These AI-driven resolutions allowed support teams shift their focus to more complex or high-priority interactions.

AI agents can handle full conversations from start to finish, and generative replies resolve common issues by surfacing relevant guidance or content based on detected intent. The level of automated resolution varied by organization, depending on strategy, customer preferences, and confidence thresholds set for AI classification.

Interviewees experienced a 50% to 56% resolution rate for inquiry types that had automated resolutions set up.

• The director of e-commerce customer experience, payments, and fraud in the retail industry said: “We have online order tracking that we’ve integrated with our bot and our interactive voice response (IVR), so resolving questions related to order tracking is now automated. Of the 15% of our volume that is live chat, 56% is automatically resolved. That’s a recovery of about 5,000 agent hours per week. We still get customers who want to speak to us after we’ve automatically resolved their question about order tracking. Some of our customers like the element of human assurance.”

• The technical program director in the health and wellness industry said: “The generative replies with AI agents has the biggest impact because it helps with resolution. We have some generative replies that can result in 50% of handles resolved, depending on the intent.” When a ticket is opened, Zendesk’s AI will classify it with an intent and confidence. For example, if a customer opens a ticket about a lost password, this will classify as an intent to reset the password, likely with high confidence that the intent was accurately gauged. The interviewee said, “We started to roll out with just a few intents that would be high confidence. When a customer opens a ticket, the AI sends a suggestion of how to solve their problem based on our articles. The success was amazing. We have a much higher rate for automated resolution now.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• After reducing the contact rate and increasing transactions, Zendesk AI resolves 10% of remaining inquiries without agent interaction in Year 1, 20% in Year 2, and 30% in Year 3.

• The average cost of inquiry if handled by a human agent was $5.61.

Risks. The impact of this benefit will vary among organizations based on the following factors:

• The organization’s strategy for AI resolutions and the percentage of inquiries set up for automated resolutions based on type or intent.

• The organization’s use case and application of Zendesk’s AI automated resolution.

• The cost to handle an inquiry before Zendesk.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $6.5 million.

Reduced Handle Time

Evidence and data. With optimized self-service and automatic resolutions closing Tier 0 and Tier 1 inquiries, those routed to human agents are likely more complex. Some interviewees noted that their average handle time increased because of this complexity. However, they remarked that with Zendesk, the handle time was still lower compared to what it would have been for higher-tier inquiries. Zendesk’s Agent Workspace offsets the time required for higher-tier inquiries by streamlining how agents access information: Zendesk’s built-in knowledge section enables quick search, contextual suggestions, and agent-contributed content. Paired with AI-powered copilot — which surfaces insights, recommends next steps, and executes approved actions — agents can resolve complex issues faster. As a result, some interviewees still experienced a net reduction in average handle time, alongside improvements in collaboration, agent productivity, and customer satisfaction.

• Reduction in handle time through unified Agent Workspace. The vice president in the e-commerce industry was one interviewee who noted that their average handle time was nearly cut in half. They said: “Our average handle time was 500 seconds and went down to 290 seconds — so a massive reduction in handle time. Before Zendesk, issues took weeks to resolve because we didn’t have the interconnectivity, the ticket management, or the SLA maintenance, and things just got lost. And then the customer got tired and stopped responding. Now, our customer abandon rate has gone away. It used to be that 30% of customers contacting us were just hanging up on us. Now it’s 4%. That happened because our average handle time overall is so much better, so we actually have time to address the volume of contacts.”
  
  The director of customer services in the retail industry noted that their organization reduced the handle time and number of contacts to resolve an issue due to Zendesk’s knowledge centralization within the Agent Workspace. They said: “The number of contacts it takes to resolve an issue is just under two now. It used to take four contacts to resolve. And it takes five minutes now to resolve a ticket, where before it would take four or five times longer.”
  
  The same retail leader elaborated that Zendesk’s integrated knowledge base helps agents resolve issues in real time without needing to pause the conversation: “We use parts of Zendesk from the knowledge base to store a lot of the information. So when we have a new subscription method, for example, we publish the details of how it works in a Zendesk Help Center article. That article becomes the repository for information and where to find things, whereas previously it would have been a document saved on a shared drive, or a presentation saved on everyone’s desktop. Ease of use of the Knowledge Base and the search functionality means you can find information while you’re talking to the customer on the telephone, so then you don’t have to hang up and call somebody back, because there are cost implications for the phone call, that time to process, and the time you’re not available to answer. So the idea is to wrap up and give that customer information before they go, regardless of what channel you’re using.”

• Shifted agent focus to complex cases. The senior director of support in the technology industry expected the average handle time to increase, as Zendesk’s automation and self-service capabilities resolve lower-tier inquiries effectively — allowing agents to focus on more complex, high-touch cases. They explained: “One of the largest benefits of Zendesk is that having all of our teams on the same centralized platform allows us to move faster. Now that the environment is not a challenge for them, they collaborate and support each other. They’re able to move around a lot faster and provide a wider net of support across different business units. So even from a user interface perspective, with Zendesk’s features, our teams are able to work through tickets faster. So leaning into some of the benefits and features that Zendesk offers, and really focusing on those deflections, automations, chatbots, and IVR builds, we hope to effectively resolve lower-tier inquiries, and we expect our resolution time to honestly increase as a result because our team is working the higher tiers. Our total ticket volume should decrease by 20% to 30%, but our average resolution time will increase. We’re anticipating that.”
  
  The vice president of operations and customer experience in the technology industry agreed that tickets would become more complex — but emphasized that Zendesk enables them to turn this shift into a strategic advantage. They added: “The average handle time includes higher ticket volumes of quick responses that we can resolve with Zendesk. Then we have low-volume client issues that have longer resolution times, and with Zendesk we’re able to filter and create insights by the type of support. So what is meaningful to us are the nuances we can create for customer experience and the decisions to address different inquiry types through Zendesk. Even though we can resolve 30% of tickets, those tickets have quick resolution times, and so they’re disproportionate to the hours that a potential agent would be spending on a [more complex] issue.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Zendesk helps the composite reduce contact rate, increase transactions, and increase automated resolutions. Of the inquiry volume routed to agents, they shave 2 minutes off the handle time in Year 1, 2.5 minutes in Year 2, and 3 minutes in Year 3.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for an agent is $34.

Risks. The impact of this benefit will vary among organizations based on the following factors:

• The complexity and volume of tickets routed to human agents.

• The composite’s fully burdened hourly salary for an agent.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $6.6 million.

Agent Retention And Accelerated Onboarding

Evidence and data. The efficiency of onboarding and training processes can impact an organization’s bottom-line financials significantly. Companies must adopt innovative solutions to streamline employee training and cultivate a culture of collaboration to enhance retention, particularly in customer service roles, where attrition is notoriously high. Interviewees noted that Zendesk’s AI capabilities, particularly copilot and intelligent triage, contributed to more effective onboarding. copilot supports new agents by surfacing similar past tickets for learning, providing contextual guidance on next best actions and taking approved actions on agents’ behalf — allowing agents to learn while doing. AI-powered triage further supports onboarding by routing simpler, lower-risk inquiries to new hires, helping them build confidence before taking on more complex cases. Combined with Zendesk’s knowledge base, these tools created a dynamic, guided training environment that reduced ramp time, boosted agent confidence, and improved long-term retention.

• The director of customer services in the retail industry said Zendesk unlocked the ability to onboard employees more effectively. They said: “Before Zendesk, onboarding was not effective. We had high staff attrition as a result. With the Zendesk knowledge bases and AI tools, we made a conscious decision to create a three-week induction program. The availability of technology helped us do the right thing and onboard properly. Zendesk was a big part of our new, effective onboarding process, because it is quite easy to learn. The AI helps new agents by recommending responses to customers. And because of the different queries from customers, you can do a classroom induction with AI where you teach everyone all they need to know instead of waiting to train them live through that scenario.” Training through a variety of different scenarios in the first three weeks allows new hires to ramp up quickly and work at faster rates. Agents at this interviewee’s organization had an average service length of less than one year before Zendesk, which has since improved to just under three years, a 200% improvement.

• The vice president in the e-commerce industry said: “Our onboarding time went from nine weeks to three. We used Zendesk’s tools to build a training environment and integrated with the guide. So we’ve got around 12,000 articles with tools now that are very extensible and allow us to triple-train people. We get new hires up and running in a couple of weeks, and then we can target their training with very specific inquiries and ramp up the training later as they get efficient.”

• The same interviewee explained that they chose not to expand the use of an alternative solution because it was too difficult to manage. They chose Zendesk instead, which facilitated training new agents, and said: “When we started demoing Zendesk, I realized that I could train people from the ground up with no Zendesk experience. It was just so much easier and intuitive to use for a nonuser. That was a big part of it. Additionally, Zendesk was more flexible with us than other companies, so I believed in the relationship. Our attrition rates were 2.5% per week when I started. They’re still high, but almost half that now.”

• The director of customer services in the retail industry noted that the insights available through Zendesk had influenced and shifted hiring priorities at their organization to favor speed and cordiality: “The vast majority of our customers, when complimenting us on good service, would tell us they were very pleased that we answered their query quickly and in a friendly way. I’ve joked about this many times, because neither of those things are what you might call a luxury, and we’re supposed to be a luxury retailer. So we measure ourselves on those qualities. We recruit people with these qualities.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite has 225 agents in Year 1, and with 10% annual revenue growth, expects to need 248 agents in Year 2 and 273 agents in Year 3.

• The composite’s attrition rate before Zendesk is 65%.

• The composite’s training before Zendesk is inefficient as it awaits real scenarios to train agents. Before Zendesk, bringing an agent to full capacity requires 360 hours of onboarding time.

• Due to reduced contact rates, automated resolutions, and reduced handle time with Zendesk, the composite needs 184 agents in Year 1, 159 in Year 2, and 135 in Year 3.

• With effective onboarding and access to knowledge bases after Zendesk, agents are more engaged with customers and better equipped to handle inquiries. The agent attrition rate reduces by 50% and onboarding accelerates by 67%.

Risks. The impact of this benefit will vary among organizations based on the following factors:

• The company’s revenue growth rate and the expected number of agents to support its generated volume.

• The company’s attrition rate before Zendesk.

• The company’s onboarding approach before and after Zendesk.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $3.2 million.

Faster Integration And Speed To Value

Evidence and data. A major driver of Zendesk adoption for interviewees was the ability to deploy and integrate quickly, particularly as their organizations experienced periods of rapid growth and expansion into new markets and channels. Interviewees noted they could configure AI agents in just a few clicks using plain language prompts without requiring technical expertise. As needs evolved, they also found it easy to extend functionality — adding workflows, connecting to third-party systems, or enabling human handoffs with minimal development effort.

• The vice president in the e-commerce industry said: “With Zendesk, we can spin up, deploy, and provision a new instance in days with our operations enablement team. When we moved [into a new market], we were able to spin up in less than four weeks, and that includes the requirements-gathering phase. It’s just so much faster.”

• The senior director of support in the technology industry said: “Setting up all the channels can be done very quickly within Zendesk. Zendesk has made it very easy for us to flip on live AI chat without technical knowledge, and it’s very powerful for resolutions.”

• Describing a particular case of speed to value, the senior lead of Zendesk and support tools administrator in the services industry remarked on how quickly integrations in Zendesk delivered on localizations. The interviewee said: “With Zendesk, it’s at least three to four times faster to publish translated articles [compared to alternative solutions in the market] and arguably even faster with a [language translation] integration. I create my source article, then for each translation, there’s a menu for the languages. For example, I click French, paste my content from my translation team, and I’m done. Further, because Zendesk creates a relationship between source articles and their translations, it’s easy to see how they stand up next to each other and perform compared to their language variants using Zendesk Analytics, so organizationally it’s very convenient. This is not the case with [alternative solutions]. There may be a plugin for that capability, but [other solutions] are not purpose-built for translations, may conflict with versions or themes, or may be hit-or-miss with functionality.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Four IT admins save 70% of their time over Year 1 and Year 2, and five developers save 50% of their time over Years 1, 2, and 3 to develop, configure, and manage components of its customer service solution.

• The fully burdened annual salary for an IT admin is $120,000.

• The fully burdened annual salary for a developer is $135,000.

Risks. The impact of this benefit will vary among organizations based on the following factors:

• The number of support tools the organization integrates with Zendesk and the frequency of updates.

• The complexity of integrations before Zendesk and the number of IT admins and developers necessary to implement them.

• The organization’s size and ability to handle the complexity.

• The fully burdened annual salary for an IT admin and a developer.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $910,000.

Legacy Environment Savings

Evidence and data. After switching to Zendesk, interviewees saved on licensing from decommissioned tools used in the prior environment. Interviewees also noted that deploying a CRM saved them effort. When their organizations were smaller, they had to use disparate tools, which manual routing and reviews of inquiries.

• The technical program director in the health and wellness industry described decommissioning a previous CRM to implement several new capabilities and integrating Zendesk with back-end systems to deliver personalized customer experiences.

• The senior vice president of digital operations in broadcasting decommissioned a previous business email services inbox and a cloud-based app-building platform. The interviewee noted: “Compared to those tools, time and labor savings are pretty significant now with Zendesk because we automate so much. We have the data with Zendesk to automate. It’s a big increase in efficiency. We probably would have needed two more people just to help focus on all of the data issues and reporting.”

• The director of customer services in the retail industry described that before Zendesk, 98% to 99% of tickets would need to be routed to the appropriate agent manually. The same interviewee noted that before Zendesk, employees would review a sample of 8% to 9% of tickets for quality assurance. They said: “We started measuring [quality] as an internal project. Someone would review calls at random to manually look at tickets. It wasn’t scalable. We’ve moved onto Zendesk QA in the last 10 days, and that means we can now QA pretty much 100% of their tickets. It was only 8% or 9% before.” Zendesk now automates routing and QA review processes at their organization.

• The technical program director in the health and wellness industry said: “I need to understand the behavior of the requests. And without Zendesk, that’s not scalable. For example, I have 10 people in our quality team that used to read tickets to see if the agents categorize the tickets correctly and answer using the correct macro or the correct words — not too aggressive, not too informal. The quality assurance team can read maybe 8,000 to 9,000 tickets per month. With QA from Zendesk, we now are able to run 100% of the ticket quality assurance with AI. And these 10 people don’t need to read tickets anymore; they now focus on other organizational priorities.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite saves $250,000 per year from decommissioning prior tools, such as inboxes, telephony solutions, and previously deployed components of a CRM.

• The composite reallocates four FTEs from manual ticket routing, reviews, and reporting.

Risks. The impact of this benefit will vary among organizations based on the following factors:

• The company’s approach to ticket routing, review, and quality assurance before Zendesk, and the number of FTEs supporting these previously manual tasks, relative to the company’s size and capacity.

• The solutions, point or centralized, in a company’s prior environment.

• The degree to which the company decommissions its prior environment.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.3 million.

Additional Value

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced, but were not able to quantify, as contributing meaningful value:

• Improved CSAT scores. Interviewees noticed improvements specifically with their CSAT scores. The vice president in the e-commerce industry said: “Back when we launched a service [without Zendesk], we would have probably had to triple headcounts in places just to make up for manual processes, and we had significantly worse customer experiences. It would probably be a 10-point drop in CSAT. Before we deployed Zendesk, our CSAT was at 76. It’s now 80. Zendesk as a platform enabled us to deploy all the changes I wanted to make to increase our score.”
  
  The director of customer services in retail noted that before Zendesk, their organization measured its CSAT score for the first time after implementing Zendesk at 78, which then improved with Zendesk to just below 90. The interviewee added that customers now received responses without long wait times and said: “We measured the number of days of backlog we have. It’s a calculation of the total number of open tickets versus the average number. In other words, if you were to stop getting new tickets right now, how many days would it take to run out of work? And when we first started measuring that, it was about four days. Today it’s 0.8. It’s very rarely over one day.”

• Improved quality assurance. Interviewees noted that agent performance improved noticeably once their organizations could automate quality reviews on all interactions with Zendesk. The vice president in the e-commerce industry remarked on quality assurance speed and compliance, saying: “In the past, quality assurance has been a huge issue for us, but we’ve now integrated that with Zendesk and are probably four times faster. We get four times as much done with the same workforce. We have business-as-usual quality compliance rates that have gone up four times.”
  
  The director of customer services in retail described how quality assurance unlocked a shift in focus, and said: “Through Zendesk QA, we rate the quality of our calls and our email interactions, and each member of staff is given a quality score. Automating quality assurance means managers can focus on the output of those quality reviews rather than the input. So if Zendesk QA is telling me that certain agents are not building a rapport with the customer — they’re not using the customer’s name, they’re not using a greeting, they’re not saying thank you or goodbye — we can build a picture of the data for where we need to spend time training. Now instead of reviewing tickets, managers can put together training and coaching programs.”
  
  The same interviewee noted that improvements from quality assurance were clear from customer feedback: “Before Zendesk, we were reacting to complaints instead of being proactive. If somebody took the trouble to tell us that our service was poor, then we would react to that rather than review the trend before it resulted in complaints. I’m proud to say that now, we’re very rarely getting complaints. I’d say we get as many compliments as we get complaints — which from our original position is almost a 100% improvement in the sentiment of the customer feedback.”

• Enabled employee upskilling. All interviewees who used automated quality assurance reviews with Zendesk remarked that the automated tracking and observability of trends enabled managers and agents to upskill, as supervisors shifted their focus from routing and reviewing to training and mentoring their teams. Additionally, with Zendesk’s reduced contact rate and automated resolutions relieving the workload of simpler tickets, agents could shift their skill-building focus to the more complex technical- and expert-level queries they receive.

• Cleared enterprise security requirements. Zendesk upholds industry security standards, including ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and SOC 2, and uses various security measures like encryption in transit, transport layer security, and network vulnerability scanning. The vice president in the e-commerce industry said, “[Zendesk] meets all our access requirements — logically separated workspaces, SSL, etc., our data locality, data redaction, and data protection requirements. Our security does regular reviews and we’ve been able to pivot to any updated or changed requirements with no outstanding security infractions.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Zendesk and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Expanding use of Zendesk product and features. Interviewees expressed excitement about Zendesk’s innovation and introduction of new products and features. The director of customer services in the retail industry said: “Zendesk is coming out with new features all the time. In fact, one just popped into my inbox while we were talking. Our strategy is to understand what the new features are and see how best we can use them. We want to be able to get our warehouse and buying function more efficient and onboard products quicker, get to market quicker, and make more sales.”

• Personalized journeys through customer personas and profiles. Interviewees who were not yet using AI for proactive messaging expressed plans for future use and noted its role in personalization. The director of e-commerce customer experience, payments, and fraud in retail said: “I think the future of what we could do in partnership with Zendesk is to offer proactive and predictive service. We’ll take the customer more fully into account — what we know from past interactions with customer service coupled with what we know about their online or in-store purchase history to really anticipate their needs. Then we can play a bigger role in supporting customers in making purchases. We can provide personalized support on product inquiries with contextual and relevant responses, really translating that into conversion and sales.”

• Continued scalability and agility with growth. The vice president of operations and customer experience in the technology industry remarked: “To have a project or initiative that gives us scalability while adding to our agility is so rare. You almost always have tradeoffs. If you want more agility, you lose scalability. If you want more scalability, you lose agility. With Zendesk, as a whole, we’re able to enhance agility and scalability at the same time. Some of that is a credit to our teams, but the rest of that is a credit to the type of tools Zendesk provides and how easy they are to navigate. You don’t need a developer to do this. You don’t have to have a technology background to add these enhancements, build a feature, or enhance a macro. The ease of usability of Zendesk was a huge a factor for why we achieved both agility and scalability.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).