Growing Rapidly

Based in San Francisco, CA, Founded by a teacher in 2004, School Loop is an online service that helps K-12 districts keep students in school and on track. More than 2,000 schools in 120 districts across 25 states use services from School Loop. The company’s clients include San Francisco Unified, Long Beach Unified, Los Angeles Unified, and Kansas City Schools. Throughout School Loop’s rapid growth, the company has remained true to its vision that all schools should be able to realize the benefits of learning communities.

Craving a Flexible Online Support Solution

When School Loop first launched its services, the company relied on a single customer support specialist who fielded requests by email. But, when School Loop’s popularity surged, the company hired several more support staff and realized it would need a more formalized customer support solution.

Realizing that School Loop lacked the IT resources to develop an in-house support system, Bob Charpentier, director of services, began to look for a web-based help desk software that would be simple to set up and highly scalable to the growing company’s needs.

Starting Out Simple

“I already knew Zendesk had a slick, intuitive interface,” Charpentier explains. “We simulated real scenarios by creating and responding to support tickets, and through the testing process alone it was clear that Zendesk was a better solution. Our support staff loved it immediately.”

School Loop uses Zendesk features such as triggers, macros, and automations to streamline daily support tasks. The team created an action-based notification and standard response that allows each agent to add internal comments that can not be viewed by customers. Agents receive email notifications that contain a full ticket history, and allow them to consider the input of their fellow agents as they work to provide speedy solutions.

Another custom trigger in Zendesk allows School Loop to add a tag to each ticket that specifies the requester’s role—such as teacher, student or parent—so the company can track traffic by role and better train and allocate its support resources. School Loop has also added automated notifications to control the amount of time before tickets are closed or before users are sent a pending reminder.

In addition, the community forums within Zendesk are making it easier for School Loop to communicate with a wide range of personnel. Forums allow users to make comments and ask questions about School Loop technology, sharing tips and tricks to help each other get more out of the software.

“We decided to start slowly with our use of support forums, but the experience has been so positive that we’re confident in opening the forums to all administrators, teachers and school staff for the 2010-11 school year,” says Charpentier. “We also hope to make use of Zendesk’s remote authentication capabilities to better integrate the support portal with our own login system.”

Providing Teachers With the Highest Level of Support

Since its founding, School Loop has prided itself on answering support requests quickly. Zendesk is helping the company cement its reputation for taking care of customers.

Most of School Loop’s support tickets come from teachers, and many of their questions have to do with gradebooks. With Zendesk, School Loop’s agents can respond quickly with accurate—and empathetic—answers.

“Many of us at School Loop are former teachers who understand how tough and demanding a teacher’s job is,” Charpentier explains. “We do all we can to help teachers as quickly as possible. Zendesk helps us maintain our culture of providing them with a high level of support.”

Making Smarter Business Decisions

Zendesk is also helping School Loop make smarter business decisions. By carefully tracking its incoming support tickets, the company determined that it could afford to continue providing free support to users of its free product—increasing the chances that these users will eventually become paying customers.

“Working with Zendesk has been a constant stream of, ‘Wow, we didn’t know the solution could do that, too!’” Charpentier concludes. “The support ticket system is sophisticated, yet it’s so simple that we don’t even need a support phone number. Zendesk has been a fantastic business partner.”