Evolving to Change

Based in New Zeland, the New Zealand (NZ) Post is part of the national landscape integral to the kiwi way of life for 170 years. Originally a traditional postal service, the NZ Post is committed to being part of New Zealand’s future and are evolving and developing their business to meet the changing needs of our customers. This involves looking at how a traditional postal service can survive and thrive in a world that is increasingly moving to electronic forms of communication.

Serving Two Use Cases

The NZ Post uses Zendesk for two major workflows:

• external customer support for managing trouble tickets with APIs, mobile apps, and blogging software
• internal help desk for employee-only support forum

Delivering Beyond Requirements

Previously, the teams were using a basic Gmail label workflow for customer support, an approach that proved to be both complex and opaque in terms of giving people visibility over the data.

The NZ Post’s top four requirements for help desk software included:

• Ease of use for both customers and agents, throughout the ticket workflow and online FAQ/forum area
• Integrated email ticket management, FAQs, and forum capability
• Search-friendly knowledge base
• Established, proven, and well-documented API for CRM integration

“The evaluation concluded that Zendesk was significantly superior to the competition, not just based on our key criteria, and therefore clearly the best solution for our needs,” says Rob Holmes, strategic analyst at NZ Post.

The company has made a radical move for a large enterprise-based business to leverage web-based software-as-a-service.

“The change to web tools has proved to be revolutionary,” says Holmes. “We have adopted a large number of tools with similar characteristics to Zendesk – such as Wufoo, FogBugz, Yammer and more. All are far superior to the traditional enterprise tools we were previously stuck with.”

Affecting Organizational Change

Before implementing Zendesk, NZ Post assessed that they needed to invest in 12 agent licenses as they were expecting a flood of support tickets. However, with Zendesk, they realized that two agents was all they needed in order to provide very fast response and resolution times. Holmes believes that this can be attributed to the effectiveness of FAQs and community forums, where people can find answers for themselves, instead of submitting a support request.

Thanks to the highly configurable nature of Zendesk, NZ Post has been able to customize the support ticket workflow to match their needs. Now, the support team has the ability to automatically assign tickets to subject matter experts, instead of forwarding emails on a per ticket basis.

NZ Post is also loving the Zendesk integration with Yammer via targets. The integration enabled agents to request help from the Yammer community by simply tagging a ticket in Zendesk.

Zendesk has been a huge success for NZ Post. Within a couple of weeks, members of the NZ Post senior leadership team were signing up, uploading their photographs, and answering employee questions in the forums.