Reprise rolls out Zendesk CX to ensure personalized B2B service

For clients sitting through a sales pitch or product demo, seeing is believing. A dynamic and well-produced multimedia presentation can make or break an important deal, and that’s what drives professional storytellers to seek out the best possible tools.

As the world’s leading demo creation platform, Reprise is changing the way companies sell software. The team’s award-winning technology empowers enterprise sales and marketing teams to expertly build live demos and seamlessly showcase products with endless customization–no developer needed.

Although Reprise was first in market with this demo technology, it’s now a fairly crowded space with a lot of players. The company continues to set itself apart by delivering a fully-integrated platform for demo creation with multiple product offerings, providing excellent customer support, and creating experiences that are empowering rather than transactional.

“I think our differentiator is not only having a breadth of technology that delivers all of these different demos, but also our customer service accompaniment,” says Paul Vidal, VP Customer Success at Reprise. “We realized very quickly that making sure our customer support is the best in the field allows us to onboard very large companies well. So we bring this ability to create programs around how to be highly successful with our tool.”

Switching to Zendesk for agility and customizability

At Reprise, the expectation is always to provide bespoke responses throughout the customer journey and create more personalized experiences. Zendesk stood out as an ideal CX partner that aligned with the company’s values and would enable more agility and customization.

“It’s no secret, Zendesk is the number one platform for customer support based on any other tool that we looked at,” shares Vidal. “You need to have the platform that you’re using adapt to the very personal needs of your customers. The other support solutions were very generic, non-customizable, and didn’t suit our needs.”

Another reason for switching to Zendesk Suite Professional was the ability to add Zendesk messaging, which gives Reprise’s small but mighty support team access to all the customer context within each conversation. “There were a lot of shortcomings with the previous solution, Intercom, because we couldn’t get the full messaging history or properly track different ticket queues–things that were super important to us,” Vidal explains. “We sorely needed the ability to create a better help center and documentation. So we chose Zendesk and haven’t looked back.”

Vidal now leads between 12 to 15 people who interact with Zendesk every day, including customer success managers, field engineers (pre- and post-sales), and support agents. In addition to leveraging Zendesk’s voice support, data reporting, and help center, the teams use messaging within the Reprise product to quickly and easily connect B2B customers with agents. The new messaging channel accounts for a majority of tickets and conversations coming into support.

Custom help centers improve the user experience

Creating a better user experience through self-service was a top priority for the Zendesk implementation, so the team wasted no time building an external help center for customers and an internal knowledge base for employees. One of the first things Vidal’s team did was to recreate their documentation center according to best practices, including updates to Reprise How-To articles, academy, and success content.

These help center improvements marked a crucial transition for Reprise, as they shifted away from their early startup mode of operation–an “all hands on deck” approach that involved documenting along the way–toward a more methodical process of creating documentation before providing solutions. “Now we have the ability to customize our help center with the right themes and consistency so the articles will be published, categorized, and tagged properly,” Vidal says. “I’m even able to go deep into the HTML to do exactly what I want it to do.”

Since switching to Zendesk and adding self-service resources, Reprise has seen a very positive response from customers and achieved consistently high satisfaction ratings, including an average CSAT of 98 percent.

Empowering customer success with data & automations

Data consolidation and analysis are a key part of Reprise’s strategy to empower success for their customers. Thanks to Zendesk’s integration capabilities, the company has been able to make great strides. The team built a custom integration with Jira that pulls data from the product, Zendesk, and Salesforce CRM into a centralized place to provide a scorecard dashboard for each customer. Having a clear, comprehensive view of the customer will help agents on their path to offering personalized, timely support.

Each Reprise product has its own best practices that vary by use case (web demo vs call demo), so Vidal’s team wanted a way to categorize these procedures for the product and engineering teams. With Zendesk, Reprise has been able to automatically populate data fields that are used for troubleshooting, classify any performance issues, and fix them on the backend. Better ticket triage and tagging processes means the team can generate more actionable reporting.

Zendesk also empowered Reprise to make tremendous improvements in efficiency, without adding headcount. The team saw a 95 percent drop in average resolution time (from 40 days to 2 days) and decreased their ticket update time by 71 percent (from 72 hours to 21 hours).

The future of proactive messaging

Reprise has tirelessly worked to enable more automated messaging that anticipates customer problems and provides solutions. With a complete messaging history, the support team can now create specific pre-loaded questions to capture the customer’s perspective (“It looks like you need help with…”), rather than presenting the customer with a frustrating prompt (“I need more details before I can help you”).

Zendesk data has given team members valuable insights into various user segments: the storytellers who run the script, the people who build the demo, and the people who deploy the demo. The more that Reprise learns about the different customer personas and how they engage with support, the better they can provide customized support to each user.
Since hiring a new head of support who is well versed in Zendesk, Reprise looks forward to adding even more messaging functionality. Next up? An integration with Jira bot that engineers can use for internal communication.

According to Vidal, “The whole goal is to anticipate what a customer might need. There’s a world I want to be in where we’re able to proactively reach out to our customers to help them be successful with the tool.” Creating positive experiences today also helps create loyal customers tomorrow and increases the lifetime value of those customers.