Going’s journey with Zendesk delivers efficiency and cost savings

Many people remember spinning the globe as a child and letting their finger stop on a surprise destination. What if choosing a new place to travel was still that easy and exciting?

Going is bringing the imagination and spontaneity back into the travel planning experience. The fully remote Colorado-based startup monitors airfare to over 900 destinations worldwide, so travelers can get amazing curated deals on plane tickets–every single day. Users choose a starting location (or home airport), and Going reveals flight times, travel dates, airlines, or destinations that might not otherwise be on their radar.

Going’s Director of Member Success, Rob Medina, handles all aspects of the member experience, from customer-facing support to operations. That includes the help center, forums, macros, content management, internal knowledge, and reporting.

An ongoing challenge for Medina’s team is managing member expectations and supporting education. Customer service can be difficult because members come from every point on the travel spectrum. Some are professionals, while others have never left the country or flown on a plane.

Many users view the Member Success team as all-around travel experts, so they ask questions about how to book flights, choose an airline, manage visa requirements, make seat arrangements, or get tips on safety and destinations as a solo traveler. Answering those follow-up questions takes time. And, users may not realize that if they wait too long, they could miss out on the deals–which often come and go quickly.

Leaders vote for Zendesk

Medina’s goal was to help the team reimagine the member onboarding experience using new technology. Going had a tool that worked well, but it took a lot of manual tasks to connect various systems, pull data from Excel sheets, and make reports look presentable.

After a decade of using Zendesk and other CRM tools at various companies, Medina was a big fan, but he wanted everyone on his team to be involved in selecting Going’s next tool. He asked them to evaluate several systems, including Intercom, Kustomer, and Help Scout.

“From a change management perspective, it’s important to get the team’s buy-in and loop them in,” Medina explains. “My managers are going to be pulling reports, looking at stats, making dashboards, and they’ll need to know how the triggers and automations work.”

The team chose Zendesk as the best solution to help them consolidate different sources of information and channels in an efficient, cost-effective way. “Zendesk is a big name in the industry, so it has the clout to pull in data, to acquire, to learn from others, to be competitive, and to push the boundaries on AI,” adds Medina.

Zendesk delivers efficiency and cost savings

Joining the Zendesk for Startups program set Going up for long-term success with six months of free Zendesk support and cost savings on a multi-year contract.

“I was impressed by the Zendesk for Startups program and how the team provided support, education, and guidance, and asked exactly what we hoped to achieve. Our Zendesk contact made it a slam dunk, whether it was supporting decision makers or answering financial, engineering, and technical questions,” shares Medina.

Member Success also reported quicker first and second contacts with members after switching to Zendesk. “For our small and mighty team, the implementation of Zendesk helped us create more efficiencies. We don’t need to scale as much as we previously thought, because of the automations and triggers,” says Medina. “We’ve also had people move to other teams internally, and we haven’t needed to backfill those roles, because we set up Zendesk to enable growth.”

Connecting the dots between tickets and teams

With Zendesk, Going has been able to unify support across email, help center, web forms, social messaging, community forums, and messaging bots. A lot of member questions can be answered through self-service channels. For specific queries regarding a bug or a technical outage, email is the fastest, most accessible channel.

The company routinely leverages the Zendesk-Slack connection to create live feedback channels around newsletters, special deals, and mobile updates, while the Stripe integration is occasionally used to pull in billing information.

Communication with product and engineering teams also improved, because the Jira integration helps everyone connect the dots between tickets, conversations, and bug reports. Different teams can now access information and member conversations without asking Member Success.

“Zendesk does a good job creating those integrations and tools, so that we can bring people into our world in a way that works for them,” says Medina. “When support teams can master that art of cross-functional communication using Zendesk integrations with Slack and Jira, other groups will be more excited to seek help next time.”

Employee happiness starts with great CX tools

In less than a year, Going realized the value that great CX tools provide on a company and an individual level.

“Zendesk enabled our team to set up relevant SLAs, create reports, and truly understand the metrics, which was a massive win for us early on,” Medina says. “That helped us get more clarity and become more analytical about changing our macros and auto-responses to improve deflection and self-service.”

Allowing team members to track their performance leads to better life-work balance for employees and greater employee retention for Going.

“Zendesk has enabled the team to look at their own metrics and validate their good work,” adds Medina. “It’s empowering for the team to see that they had an amazingly effective day. It helps people come back to work the next day feeling refreshed, as the best version of themselves.”

More than a reactive support center

Now that Going can create customized Zendesk dashboards for different teams, such as marketing, mobile, and engineering, that gives Medina another way to show his team’s value.

“We can provide feedback and insights through voice of the customer data, monthly reporting, and everything we do to advocate for the member experience. The company has been able to use our Member Success data in very strategic ways,” he says.

Medina also creates opportunities for associates to meet with other teams and share learnings about member behavior.

“Saying yes to projects outside of the support queue helped us demonstrate our knowledge and expertise to leadership in a new way. The investment in CX has shown that we are more than a reactive support center,” Medina says. “We’ve been able to show the ROI, not just financially, but in our ability to build cross-functional relationships.”

Smarter experiences with AI

Next, the company looks forward to integrating the Going app with Zendesk and creating automations to drive efficiency. The solution may be AI or conversational bots that would allow users to connect the APIs and get information about their membership, renewal date, or Stripe invoices anytime.

“Our goal with AI is to help agents work smarter and more efficiently, so we can cut down on manual tasks performed each day. We’re not trying to take people’s jobs, we just want to take things off their plate that can be solved with a macro or deflected in a better way, whether that’s proactively or educational,” Medina adds.

He envisions using AI to curate resource guides to help members build an experiential trip after booking their flight. With over two million users, Going could create a rich knowledge base where members share stories and travel tips, from favorite cafes to friend connections.

A thought leader in CX

On their CX journey, Going became an active user of Zendesk Community forums and Slack groups, where people go out of their way to make videos and share technical tips. Medina appreciates that “Zendesk comes with an ecosystem of knowledge,” because their previous tool did not offer a robust community or many self-service options outside of support hours.

In Medina’s experience, “Zendesk is one of the strongest tools out there. They are constantly iterating and they care about customer feedback, so they’re able to evolve and push the boundaries of what a tool can do while keeping the core functionality strong.”