Catapult offers elite CX performance with Zendesk AI

Founded in Melbourne in 2006, Catapult has helped countless sports teams, along with professional and amateur athletes around the world, unleash their full potential. “We create technology that allows athletes to track their performance data and sync with both event data and video. We sync these data points together to help our users improve planning, training, and coaching strategies,” explains Thomas Powers, the Vice President of Operations Product Support at Catapult Sports.

24/7 tiered support

Serving a very diverse customer base—from world-class teams and athletes to parents who seek reliable wearables to safeguard their children—Catapult needed a customer service solution that could offer the right kind of support at the right time.

“We have different tiers of customers and different solutions for each, all requiring different levels of support,” shares Powers. “Professional athletes are our high-impact tier, requiring urgent replies from our team. They also frequently travel all over the world, so we need to be available to them 24/7. We started looking for a solution that would help us prioritize customers in the appropriate way and help us become more efficient.”

Catapult also needed to synchronize data from Salesforce, giving its agents information about client health and integrating them with the sales and logistics teams. It was also looking for more reporting features to monitor how the support team was doing. This was not a simple task, since Catapult’s support team was available on a variety of channels: phone calls, chat, emails, and SMS.

The winning choice for world-class service

Zendesk solutions provided an answer to this complex challenge. Eight years ago, Catapult chose Zendesk to help manage its service tickets, which today reach an average of 76,000 annually. The team of 68 agents started categorizing incoming tickets by customer tier, type, urgency, complexity, and product.

Catapult set up different support queues and service-level agreements (SLAs) for each customer tier to ensure that elite athletes received the specialized support they needed. Zendesk dashboards also made it easy to measure customer satisfaction and handle time for each agent, enabling Catapult to assess performance, give agents personalized feedback, and make informed staffing decisions.

The company saw a dramatic reduction in first response time and full resolution time with Zendesk omnichannel support. At the time, first response time stood at an impressive 18 minutes and full resolution time at just four hours. But even more impressive results were just down the road.

“We’re always striving for improvements,” says Powers. “Our goal is to deliver world-class service levels to all of our customers. That separates us from competitors and allows us to provide mission-critical support to our customers.”

Introducing AI “at our own pace”

In 2023, Catapult decided to take its CX game to the next level using artificial intelligence. The goal was to seamlessly introduce AI into the team’s workflows without jeopardizing the trust they’d built with customers. To accomplish that, the company spent six months testing Zendesk Advanced AI in a sandbox environment.

“Because Zendesk is customizable, we were able to choose where and how we wanted to deploy AI,” recalls Powers. “We stepped into this project with a roadmap of our milestones and our audience, so we were able to control that journey and take it at our own pace.”

“Participating in the early access program for AI and intelligent triage allowed us to provide direct feedback to product managers. The way we’re utilizing it today is to prioritize our customer tickets coming in and gain insight as soon as possible, so we can make better decisions.”

Intelligent triage powers efficiency

Now that agents receive helpful ticket context at a glance, they can simply apply macros to reprioritize queues and elevate each ticket to the right person.

“Intelligent triage allows us to understand the type of ticket coming in and its priority level, and gain insight into the customer sentiment. That helps us identify the critical issues that our agents need to prioritize quickly,” Powers explains.

Catapult has been able to enhance ticket routing and provide faster service with Zendesk Advanced AI, while reducing manual workload.

“Previously, we had six global technicians focused on triaging tickets,” says Powers. “Since implementing intelligent triage, we’ve been able to move those agents over to handling support issues with customers, which has improved our efficiency significantly.”

A faster solution for complex tickets

Some Catapult tickets involve handoffs to multiple agents and lengthy notes tracking the customer journey. Powers remembers looking at these complicated support issues and thinking, ‘There’s no way AI could summarize this conversation with a customer.’

He soon discovered that “the summarize feature in Zendesk Advanced AI is a huge benefit to us. We used to spend a lot of time reviewing the notes and getting agents up to speed on complex tickets. Allowing us to click a button to summarize has saved us around three minutes per ticket in response time.” Zendesk also allows the team to integrate that summarized content with their Jira escalation process.

Since rolling out AI-powered features, Catapult has seen a 14 percent improvement in average handling time, which has dropped to just 24 minutes. First reply time has improved by a whopping 50 percent to a mere 6 minutes and full resolution time has decreased by 21 percent to 2.7 hours.

Powers is impressed with these gains in efficiency, as well as the enhancements in agent language, content, and tone made possible with artificial intelligence. “Zendesk AI’s enhanced writing features allow our agents to spend less time crafting the perfect response to customers. With one click, we can make it professional and send a proofed version to the customer,” he says.

Helping people optimize workflows

Catapult and Zendesk have enjoyed a successful partnership because they share an ethos of continuous improvement and believe in maximizing people power with technology.

“We provide our customers with tools that allow them to optimize their performance,” says Powers. “Zendesk does something similar for us, by providing the right support tools to help us improve our responsiveness, our handling time, and give customers the information they need, which drives our performance to a level that our customers expect and deserve.”

Powers believes that Catapult agents will remain at the heart of support workflows, because they have a valuable institutional knowledge about how to handle the customer relationships and the technology.
“When we look at optimizing our efficiencies within support, AI doesn’t replace our people. It empowers our people to focus on what they do best–interacting with our customers,” he says.

An empowered team with AI agents

As the company scales further, Zendesk AI will help agents take on more capacity and improve efficiencies in operations.

Over the next three years, Catapult plans to introduce AI agents into the workflows within the company’s Help Centers and applications to increase ticket deflection, while still providing high quality experiences for customers. Zendesk’s AI agents will enable them to customize responses for different customer segments and tiers.

“Using Al agents to answer common questions quickly and direct people to our Help Center content will free up our technicians to work on issues that are more complex,” Powers says. “We want to ensure that customers get the answers they need quickly and they still have an easy way to interact with humans, if necessary.”

With Zendesk Advanced AI, Catapult also has access to several generative AI-powered features that allow agents to quickly and efficiently create expanded help center content and apply a consistent brand voice. These tools can reduce the time agents spend handling administrative tasks and creating articles, while ensuring a better self-service experience for customers.

Happier agents and customers

Better CX technology makes for happier agents. “Zendesk Advanced AI has provided us with tools that save agents time, make their job easier, and empower them to make really good decisions day to day. Because of that, I have a team that really enjoys coming to work,” says Powers.

An AI-empowered team not only enabled a better agent experience, but also propelled Catapult’s CSAT score by 1.7 percentage points to reach an all-star high of 97 percent.

“I think the reason why our CSAT is so high is that we find outstanding people who love what they do,” Powers adds. “We often have customers go out of their way to compliment our staff using the survey responses. Our customers really enjoy working with our agents and find comfort in knowing we are always here to assist them through any issues that arise.”