Kwik Kopy’s award-winning graphic design and print services has enabled Australian businesses to attract and retain customers, and increase sales for almost 40 years.

An independent Australian company catering for every part of the design and print cycle, Kwik Kopy was established in 1982 and now has more than 100 centers operating countrywide. All of its centres are franchised, supported by a head office team.

Successful business growth requires a streamlined internal support

With hundreds of centres located across the country, KwikKopy is one of Australia’s most successful franchised businesses.

Up until early 2011, Kwik Kopy’s Management Information System (MIS) was supported by its internal IT team of five. With a high volume of incoming support requests and a relatively small internal support team the process of managing these tickets was becoming increasingly cumbersome.

C-Y Thew, Business Solutions Manager, Kwik Kopy, explains, “With so many queries coming into the team, but no way of tracking them, we realised we had no visibility as to who was doing what. Important business reporting data such as tracking whether a problem had been resolved, or capturing the number of support calls we were receiving daily and monthly, simply wasn’t being collated. This meant it was really difficult for us to gauge just how busy the IT support team was becoming and whether we were providing them with the level of resourcing required to service our franchises efficiently and effectively.”

Keen to ensure it always provides the best and most responsive service to its franchises, the management team at Kwik Kopy recognized it needed a system that would help it consolidate and track issues raised, and actions taken to resolve them, as well as recording how issues resolution was being shared amongst the support team. The business wanted clarity amongst every team member on the tasks that had been assigned to them. It also sought a system that would allow the management team to have a quick overview of outstanding issues.

The incumbent system was a customised product originally built to manage these requests and tasks but growing the system in line with the business was proving difficult with future development and upgrades becoming increasingly expensive and time consuming to deliver. The system was also proving unpopular with its users due to its uninspiring user interface and limited functionality and so when selecting its new system, all team members were involved in the decision making process. Having trialled suppliers, Zendesk was voted the unanimous favourite receiving 100 per cent positive feedback from across the team.

Zendesk offered the solution the business so desperately needed. C-Y Thew says, “Each of our five team members has a different support function. For example, if one of our Kwik Kopy franchisee stores contacts us in the head office, we log them in Zendesk. It may be a question, problem or request that they have for their MIS system to be looked at. Once it is logged in Zendesk, a ticket is raised and we are able action it – we assign it to relevant team member for the task to be resolved. At the end of the month, we then generate reports to see which categories have the most tickets, and which team member has resolved the most. This allows us to plan resources in line with business needs or to provide training to a particular Kwik Kopy store if there are many issues logged against it.”

Flexible, easy to use and fast, instant access

What made Zendesk stand out from out from other cloud-based help desk solutions was its flexibility and ease of use. C-Y Thew explains, “We looked at a couple of potential systems but we specifically wanted a solution that could hit the ground running. Our support team is incredibly busy and so lengthy training wasn’t an option. Not only is Zendesk easy to use, it requires minimal training and is also accessible online. With team members frequently out on the road, they can log their tickets using the internet instead of having to go through our stringent server security checks. Zendesk also loads quickly which makes it much faster and more efficient when searching for old tickets.”

Improving customer service

Fundamental to running a successful franchise business model is the ability to provide your franchisee’s with high levels of customer service and support. This was one of the features that made Zendesk particularly attractive.

According to C-Y Thew, “The beauty of Zendesk for our particular business model is that it gives us the ability to ensure we support each store equally. Because we can prioritise easily, we can also identify problems quickly. There is more visibility for the amount of support that we, the franchisor, provide. Our franchisees can see that we are delivering fast and effective issue resolution and support.”

Transparent reporting that positively impacts business efficiency

One of the drawbacks of Kwik Kopy’s previous MIS was its inability to provide any meaningful reporting data, leaving the business unable to segregate and report the number of issues logged against a specific category. This meant it was effectively blind when trying to responds to issues.

C-Y Thew says, “We had no historical data to draw on and so were working in the dark when trying to understand the root cause of a particular query. We now have the ability to search previous issues easily, which takes the guess-work out of support.”

This newly acquired access to historical data and the timeline of issues means the business can help each of its Kwik Kopy stores understand the background of their particular issues and therefore reach the root of the problem much faster than before.

Future use of Zendesk

When Kwik Kopy first started using Zendesk it mainly used it to log issues that had been resolved. The team has since moved on to use it in ‘real-time’ to log issues that are being worked on, and exchange notes between team members. As workloads increase, the vision is to roll it out across its network of franchises so that they can log their issues through Zendesk directly.

Recommending Zendesk to other potential users, C-Y Thew says, “We love Zendesk for several reasons. It’s an internet based product with no installation for users. It’s easy to use, flexible, we can mould it to shape the needs of our business and we can pin point and resolve issues quickly and efficiently. We also love the fact that we don’t have to worry about software maintenance or upgrades and the straightforward billing structure makes reporting the ROI of Zendesk a breeze.

“Most importantly, it saves us time and money and enables us to have a much more transparent and intelligent view of our customer support. For our business stakeholders this has proved invaluable.”