Sure relies on Zendesk's mobile apps for seamless support

When Claire’s internet was slow for the third time that day, she emailed Sure to ask for help.

She attached a copy of a screenshot showing connection stats, and then later replied to the email to add some extra information—all of which was stored in the same Zendesk ticket for the agent at Sure to view. The technical support team called Claire back within the hour and talked her through the diagnosis of the problem on her service.

First they made some changes to her profile settings. But when this didn’t solve the problem, the ticket was assigned to a field engineer to take a look. The field engineer was able to solve the fault at Claire’s home and closed the ticket onsite using the Zendesk Support mobile app.

Each person who assisted Claire was able to see the results of the initial diagnostic tests, as well as her services and account data, pulled in through a two-way integration with the company’s billing system. Before Sure began using Zendesk, this process involved a series of back-and-forth phone calls and the creation of multiple tickets.

“Now it’s all in one place,” said Avril Trump, who manages a team of 18 reps at the company’s Customer Support Center.

Avril’s team provides the first line of support for Sure customers in Guernsey, Jersey, and the Isle of Man—handling everything from billing and technical queries, to general questions about Sure products, as well as logging fault reports.

In cases like this, when a ticket needs to be handled by another business unit, Avril’s team CC’s themselves so that they can follow the life of the ticket. They’ve even set up an automation so that Zendesk will send Avril an email if the Assignee field is ever missed. “I must admit, Zendesk has been a positive change.”

The transition to Zendesk was a necessary evolution. Previously, the support team was using a system designed for IT organizations. “The old system, Heat, required massive customization and there were still holes,” explained Sara Liddle, Head of Customer Strategy.

Sara is the steward of the customer journey at Sure. The teams across Sure are actively working to improve the customer experience across the whole of the life cycle.

“Our vision and mission, and part of the strategy, is to enhance the customer experience and make improvements,” Sara said. “We’re mapping out key journeys. We prioritize any areas where we see a specific need or know there’s a level of dissatisfaction. A lot of it is about communication, asking: ‘How do we communicate better with customers? What tools do we have and how can we best utilize them?’”

It’s Sara’s goal to use Zendesk for all customer communication. Using Zendesk Guide, Sure designed their help center with the same look and feel as the company’s main website, and use the announcements section at the top of the support page to convey operational status for all services and networks. “We love the easy access,” she said. “We can change the message at 10pm, if we need to, without anyone coming into the office.”

“What’s really important is being able to have that unified approach,” she continued, “using macros to help us get the right tone of voice, and to ensure that people are responding in the same way.”

The team at Sure is working hard to provide support across all channels: handling phone and email contacts, as well as tickets generated through the web form or from Facebook posts. They also recently started receiving voicemail transcripts as tickets. Agents use views in Zendesk to manage workflow between channels.

While Guide has helped to deflect tickets, Avril’s team has seen a marked uptick in email volume. “Email support is easier for customers with Zendesk. We reply a lot faster and the process is seamless,” she said.

The introduction of Zendesk has gone smoothly and the company has begun using Zendesk for provisioning and order management. When new orders are placed online, customers receive auto-replies from Zendesk to confirm their purchase, and to communicate delivery statuses—all in line with Sara’s vision to streamline the company’s communications.

Sara and Avril measure progress using the Zendesk reporting dashboards and Insights. They also use the SurveyMonkey integration to send out customer satisfaction surveys on the back end of calls. Their next step is to define benchmarks by department.

“What’s really great is that Zendesk has made other departments acknowledge that they need to take action on tickets, and they know there’s escalations attached to tickets,” Avril said. “Zendesk has really helped us to provide better customer support.”