Established in 2005, SwitchEasy recognized that mobile devices were becoming rapidly more popular and started out designing attractive cases for the iPhone. As Apple’s product range expanded to include iPads, iPods and MacBooks, SwitchEasy’s range expanded to provide cases to match. As well as selling its product through its online store, SwitchEasy also has an extensive global distribution network.

Improved cost, improved compatibility

With an expanding portfolio of products, the company wanted to improve how it managed its sales and product related inquiries. Emails and web forms had been the main customer communication channels but they were proving difficult to manage and track.

“We knew that we needed to change our approach to support but couldn’t find an alternative solution,” SwitchEasy’s IT Project Coordinator Zen CHIU Lap Wah said. “We first considered hosting an open source ticketing system, but it was too complicated. Wanting to explore Software as a Service (SaaS) as an option, we tried Zendesk. The decision to go with Zendesk was made based on cost and compatibility and by January 2012 we were up and running.”

Consolidating customer support

SwitchEasy is using Zendesk to manage its customer support. “Zendesk has made a huge difference to our business,” CHIU Lap Wah said. “We’ve gone from a system where we forwarded emails with cross-regional inquiries to different accounts internally, to using Zendesk, where our agents can assign those tickets to regional teams and leave them comments. Plus we can track the history, which is really important when you’ve got lots of people working globally on many different support queries. We no longer have double or even triple handling. We are much more efficient. Plus with the iPhone apps, we can manage and review our tickets on the move, so the speed and quality of our customer service has also improved significantly.”

Round the clock customer support

“Zendesk has been really quick to install,” CHIU Lap Wah said. “It’s easy for our agents to use and because of this, it has been quickly adopted across our business. We’ve been really impressed, so much so that we are considering moving to the Plus plan in the future. We have three offices located in different time zones, and by scaling up our use of Zendesk we hope to be able to provide round the clock support on a global basis. Zendesk is very much part of our business and it will stay so as we grow and evolve to meet the needs of tomorrow’s consumer technology.”