Zendesk bags Customer Support Solution Case Study of the Year at the SBR Business Case Studies Awards 2018

Zendesk's omnichannel solution empowers Circles.Life to be the company their customers want them to be.

Zendesk, the leading customer service and engagement platform, has enabled Circles.Life to take on Singapore’s telco giants by using the customer experience to differentiate its brand amongst a growing number of consumers who are tired of expensive contracts, poor customer support, and lack of data. Zendesk's omnichannel solution, which includes Zendesk Support, Guide, Chat, Talk, Connect, Message and Answer Bot, has helped Circles.Life achieve its vision of putting the power back into the hands of the customer by allowing them to choose the support channel that is most convenient and best fits their needs. Because of this, Zendesk won the Customer Support Solution Case Study of the Year at the SBR Business Case Studies Awards 2018.

With Circles.Life customer support agents based in the Philippines and Singapore, Zendesk helped them fast-track their onboarding time to two weeks - one week for learning about their company’s own products, and another on using Zendesk. This means Circles.Life has been able to launch its products faster and provide more seamless support than many of its larger competitors.

Since Zendesk is easy to implement and use, users like Circles.Life can configure and make changes quickly, enabling them to drive significant bottom-line value from the platform. Some of the benefits of Zendesk’s omnichannel support solution include widespread cost savings with low administration requirements, while giving agents the ability to keep customer data consolidated and readily available across all channels.

The efficiency of being recognised at each time they make contact also does not go unnoticed by Circles.Life’s customers, who are heavy users of Zendesk Chat, with 65% of the requests for help or support coming in through live chat.The remainder of the volume is a mix between email and social media messages.

According to John Epok Pascual, Head of Customer Service, Circles.Life tries to help their customers help themselves first using Zendesk Answer Bot, which resolves about 10% of queries coming through via email, and saves 50% on costs per question compared to a live agent answer. He also said Zendesk saves them from having to worry about integrating multiple systems.

“We want to make our self-service options as powerful as possible. We invested a lot of time into our Guide articles, and they are constantly refined and reviewed by our agents to make sure our customers have the support they need at the touch of a button,” John noted.

Circles.Life closely monitors the quality of their support to ensure they are putting the customer experience first. The team currently maintains an email SLA of three hours, a chat SLA of 60 seconds, and a first response for social media messages of 22 minutes. Circles.Life has also raised its customer satisfaction benchmark at 90%, and aims to uphold an NPS score of 54 - well above the Singapore industry average of -25.

In addition to these, Circles.Life uses several Zendesk apps as part of their omnichannel support strategy: Time Tracking to monitor time spent on tickets, Quickie to organize ticket views, Answer Suggestion to suggest relevant content for agents to give customers, and Linked Ticket to connect tickets about the same topic. Tymeshift, meanwhile, is particularly useful for managing agent schedules and performance; while Triggers and macros also comes in handy to alert customers when tickets are answered, and auto-fill answers for agents.

Working with Zendesk has been fantastic for Circles.Life, both on the agent as well as the customer side. “Whether it’s a small technical question or throwing around ideas for a bigger project, we always get swift and knowledgeable help from the Zendesk team. Our relationship is great and they really are a true partner to our business,” John said. 

“Zendesk is such an easy tool for agents to work with. It’s really been developed with their needs in mind - it’s fluid, it’s simple where it needs to be, and it’s powerful when it needs to be.”

The Business Case Studies Awards was held on June 21, 2018 at The Sheraton Towers, Singapore.

Read the full case study here:

See official event photos here.

Watch the full presentation below:

Zendesk bags Customer Support Solution Case Study of the Year at the SBR Business Case Studies Awards 2018 from Charlton Media Group on Vimeo.

If you would like to join the 2019 awards and be awarded as one of the most outstanding business solutions providers in Singapore, please email eleonor@charltonmediamail.com.