Not the same old presentation

Presentations haven’t changed much during the last twenty-five years because presentation software hasn’t evolved in that time. Enter Prezi, a company that is literally changing the look–and effectiveness–of business presentations. Prezi a cloud-based zooming presentation software that bridges whiteboards and slides, allowing users to intuitively brainstorm and share ideas and thus more effectively collaborate, develop, and present these ideas. Since Prezi is a new communication medium, it’s no surprise that the company values customer feedback. “We have always encouraged feedback from our community,” said Zoli Radnai, Prezi’s Community Manager. Radnai added that, in Prezi’s early days, the company hosted its discussion forum and support in one place–using the Get Satisfaction community support platform. As the business grew, Prezi found that it needed to provide both a general and premium support system.

For general support, the company continues to use Get Satisfaction as a discussion forum on which peer-supplied information is shared. For premium support, Prezi needed something more robust, and the company found it in Zendesk.

“As our community grew, we reached a point when we needed to offer a higher level of support to our paying users ” said Radnai. “Therefore, we have introduced a premium support system available from a dedicated support page. This is where Zendesk enters the picture.”

Quick and effective problem resolution

Using the Zendesk API, Prezi has developed a form that customers can use to submit support tickets. User account data and other technical details are filled in automatically, courtesy of the API–a feature that greatly simplifies the support process for users,” said Radnai. “As a ticket arrives to our support team, we know relevant information about the user, allowing us to provide more effective and efficient support,” he said.

Further, support at Prezi isn’t isolated to particular employees, or even a particular department. Prezi does have a team of four people who are dedicated to support, but everyone at the company– including the management, founders and CEO–provide some level of regular support. This level of engagement with customers allows Prezi to continually improve its product and processes.

“Our support team has weekly meetings we call Support Circle,” said Radnai. “Here, we discuss and log the community feedback we received that week, key issues, bugs and trends. We also use Zendesk reports and the new customer satisfaction feature to get a weekly metric, which guides how we proceed. Part of my job as Community Manager is to channel our results to our QA team and product development teams. This is how the circle completes. This process system works very fast and effectively, allowing us to pinpoint and address critical bugs in a matter of hours as well as identify new product features derived from user feedback.”

Integration with existing systems was key

Radnai said he and the Prezi team considered a number of different services before deciding on Zendesk. In addition to comparing the feature sets of the services, the team conducted interviews with company representatives and market professionals, as well as tried out the services from a customer perspective. Radnai added that Zendesk’s ease of setup and use, its flexibility and its extensibility set it apart for Prezi. In addition, since Prezi is itself a cloud-based solution, it made sense to go with a cloud-based support system.

But what may have driven the team to their ultimate decision to implement Zendesk was its ability to integrate with existing solutions–in Prezi’s case, with Get Satisfaction. “The integration with Get Satisfaction was a lure since this allows us to have a working channel between our existing discussion forum and the premium support system,” said Radnai. “During an in-person [meeting] last September at Zendesk’s San Francisco headquarters, I had the opportunity to discuss how Zendesk could help Prezi in providing support to a growing community. Inspired by this discussion, we started to hammer out a new support system for Prezi that built organically on our existing solution. One of the most important criteria was to provide better service for our users via a painless upgrade.”

Flexible framework

The Prezi team began the implementation with a Zendesk widget embedded on the company support page, then upgraded to the API-based ticket submission form, which significantly increased the value of Zendesk to the company and its customers. “As we manage tickets, we enjoy all the different widgets, macros and triggers–and the increased efficiency these bring to the system,” said Radnai. “We can customize our Zendesk setup very easily to get what we want and what helps our users to receive fast and accurate responses to their questions. We use the new customer satisfaction feature, and have plans to test the live chat feature at some point in the future. In general, we think of Zendesk as a very flexible framework that we can shape to fit our needs with the click of a button and scale with us as we grow. This flexibility and scalability are critical so we can seamlessly expand our premium support offering as we grow.” It’s early days for Prezi’s use of Zendesk, but Radnai said he and the Prezi team have already seen the value Zendesk has added.

“Our business has changed in terms of offering something new and valuable to our paying customers in the form of a fast, premium support system,” he said. “This has become part of the experience our users are getting in return for signing up to our paid licenses. Since using Zendesk, we can see that our paying customers are happy to get premium support.”