Compete Inc., headquartered in Boston, MA, is a competitive intelligence and market research company that helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing efforts based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Leading advertisers, agencies and publishers rely on Compete’s products and services to create engaging online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns.

Prior to implementing Zendesk help desk software in June 2009, Compete was using email to receive and respond to support requests. As the number of requests increased, it became increasingly challenging to respond to customers and pin point the high priority tickets. Soon after identifying this problem, one of Compete’s product managers created a Zendesk account and was using it in a matter of minutes.

“Zendesk is the Zappos of support,” says Lindsey Mark, client relations lead at Compete. “Zendesk’s help desk software has allowed us to be extremely responsive to trial and support requests without having to add more agents to our team.”

Closing The Loop From Sales To Support

The inside sales and client relations teams at Compete work very closely together. When the sales representatives have an enterprise prospect, they use Zendesk to engage with client relations in order to activate or extend a trial account.

With the Salesforce for Zendesk integration, sales reps can create new Zendesk tickets directly from the Salesforce web application, and apply a predefined response, or macro, to trial requests. The macro instantly populates the ticket with Salesforce information about the enterprise prospect, and assigns it to the client relations team. This eliminates the tedious process of inputting recurring information in a manual way, and also frees the agents from having to sign in and keep track of more than one application. Compete’s client relations team is also able to receive notifications when a specific trial account should be deactivated, by using a date ticket field in Zendesk.

“With Salesforce for Zendesk we have strengthened our internal processes and greatly improved our communications with customers,” says Mark. “This integration allows our inside sales and client relations teams to maintain transparency in our interactions with customers and provides vital context to our communications.”

Multiple Features Help Get the Job Done in Seconds

Aside from responding to trial requests, Compete also receives many customer support requests regarding the features and functionality of its products. With Zendesk, Compete has been able to automate many processes and enable agents to respond to a large number of requests in a short period of time.

Many of the support requests received are frequently asked questions. By applying a macro, or predefined answer, agents are able to respond to these questions with one-click. This saves the agent a significant amount of time and ensures that the customer is given an accurate and correct response.

“I absolutely love the searchability of the macro box,” says Mark. “I have created a large number of macros, but with Zendesk I can easily find the one I want to use and apply it to the ticket with just one-click.”

Compete also uses tags, or keywords assigned to tickets, to keep track of the most common support request topics, the number of instances that a bug occurs, or the source of the ticket (ie.- social media).

Another feature that saves time for Compete’s agents is triggers. Triggers are used to automate tickets workflows and ensure that the correct person is assigned to a support request. This way, the agent with the most expertise in a specific topic will respond to the request. Triggers make sure that no requests fall through the cracks and keep the requester informed on the status of their ticket.

Responding to Requests, Anytime, Anywhere

The iPhone and iPad mobile apps for Zendesk have also allowed Compete to respond to requests much quicker.

“When I’m off at a meeting or a trade show and I can just log in to my mobile device and see the support requests we’ve received,” says Mark. “I can easily gauge if I need to go up to my room and jump on my laptop to put out some fires, or continue to pay attention to my meeting because things are just hunky dory.”

“Without Zendesk, we would not be able to manage all of the incoming ticket requests in an organized manner, nor provide the quality of support we stand for,” says Mark.