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BigTent is where trusted groups connect online. This free platform for family-friendly organizations strengthens group involvement and simplifies group management by combining the best of today’s social networking features with group management tools. Founded in 2006, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and hosts a wide variety of groups, including parent, school, hobby, neighborhood, and community groups nationwide.

Intuitive customer support

BigTent’s online customer support team set out to find a hosted help desk solution that would be easy to implement and maintain, and simple for all customers—regardless of the technical skills—to navigate.

“Our previous solution had been complex to implement, and its look and feel was cumbersome and outdated,” says Rosa Terrazas, director of community support, BigTent. “We wanted to offer our customers a fresh, intuitive user experience without increasing our budget. Considering how stringent our requirements were, I was nervous about meeting our deadline.”

Online support solution matches company’s Web 2.0 look and feel

As Terrazas considered possible online help desk systems, Zendesk was the first name that came to mind.

“Lots of Web 2.0 companies like ours use Zendesk—and we could immediately see why,” Terrazas explains. “Zendesk’s look and feel is beautiful, elegant and clean, which matches what we work hard to achieve on the BigTent site.”

Automation reduces need for agent interaction by 22%

To keep its entire staff in touch with customer needs, BigTent regularly rotates employees from other departments onto its customer support team. Zendesk’s intuitive interface lets them get up and running quickly.

“Our new support agents on Zendesk need only a few minutes of training, basically just to understand procedures and practices,” says Terrazas. “I know our staff is immediately comfortable with Zendesk. I used to get regular questions from new users who were having trouble. Now, nobody seems to need help.”

Meanwhile, Zendesk’s intuitive navigation makes it easy for customers to submit support tickets. Powerful search features help customers find more answers for themselves. And Zendesk’s macros enable BigTent to send automated responses to many common support requests. As a result, BigTent has reduced its overall support tickets by 5.5%.

“Zendesk has been a huge time-saver for our staff,” Terrazas remarks. “Thanks to built-in business rules such as automated notifications—which our previous solution didn’t include—we’ve reduced the number of tickets requiring agent interaction by 22%. We now use Zendesk triggers to automatically answer 45% of all feature requests, requests to change email, and unsubscribe tickets.”

Zendesk has also helped BigTent personalize its communications with customers. BigTent now sends HTML and rich text emails that reinforce the company’s brand. Agents can easily augment boilerplate responses with additional information written in their own style.

“Zendesk lets us incorporate much more personality into our emails, while also ensuring we look professional and follow our company’s branding guidelines,” says Terrazas.

BigTent’s old solution was so difficult to customize that the company ended up giving up on a lot of features that would have benefited their customers.

“With Zendesk, we can customize our site with the click of a button—and we’re saving $1,000 per month,” explains Terrazas.

Add-on “extras” from iPhone to Twitter to GoodData give new power at no additional cost

Zendesk delivers several helpful “extras” for BigTent’s staff. The Zendesk for iPhone app lets Terrazas keep up with support issues during off hours. BigTent loves that Zendesk for Twitter will enable the company to identify more support opportunities through multi-channel monitoring and address them proactively.

BigTent is also “big” on measurement, which is why the customer support team is excited about the new GoodData for Zendesk capabilities. The on-demand dashboards, reporting and analytics will help BigTent understand support activity trends using advanced business intelligence techniques.

“The pre-built dashboards and out-of-the-box metrics will give us new insight into our support activities,” said Terrazas. “With the ability to quickly slice and dice data, we will be able to provide near-immediate customer intelligence to all the areas of our business that need that information to improve the customer experience—from product management to the executive team.”

The BigTent customer support staff achieved what at one time seemed impossible. In Zendesk, they found a solution that not only met, but also exceeded, all their requirements and completely transformed the customer support experience for their customers — all while staying within a tight budget.

“We love the fact that Zendesk is constantly innovating and includes the needs and opinions of its customers in that innovation,” Terrazas concludes. “Zendesk has been a huge morale boost for our support staff. Our whole company loves using it.”