Supporting employees with the latest learning technology

Vodafone Group Plc is the world’s leading mobile telecommunications company. In Australia, Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) provides 3G coverage to 94 percent of Australians. As of June 2011, VHA has 7.2 million customers in Australia. Vodafone employees and partners in offices, stores and contact centres across the country rely on the Learning and Development organization to keep them informed about the latest mobile technology and services – which puts pressure on the department’s support agents to provide outstanding service.

Simple interface enables a speedy go-live

The Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) Learning and Development team isn’t your typical corporate learning department. The group supports approximately 15,000 users and is highly focused on deploying and supporting distributed learning technology. As a result, its five agents must respond to a high volume of support requests – a task that proved difficult over email and telephone.

“When you try to share one email account across a support team, there’s no visibility into each case,” explains David Bedelis, Learning Technologies Specialist, VHA. “You can’t tell if one of your colleagues already replied to an end user or forwarded the request to another department for further research. Too many issues were falling through the cracks.”

So Bedelis began researching ticketing solutions. Although he didn’t have his heart set on a SaaS solution, it was Zendesk that caught his eye.

“Zendesk was one of the only vendors willing to give us a 30-day, fully functional free trial,” Bedelis recalls. “That showed me what confidence they had in their product. And once I logged on, I was amazed by the simplicity. It only took 30 minutes to customize the look and feel and get a new help desk up and running.”

Triggers and automations reduce tickets by 50 percent

With Zendesk, Bedelis and his team can now see the entire case history for each support ticket. Agents can enter extensive comments to keep their colleagues informed about the status of each issue.

Since going live on Zendesk, VHA’s Learning and Development team has resolved 50% of its total support tickets through Zendesk triggers and automations. As a result, the team is now making better use of its lean staff.

Zendesk’s automated business rules, or triggers, save time for VDA’s agents by eliminating the need to intervene in password resets. When a password reset ticket comes in, the system automatically sends the requester an email containing a link to a support forum page that provides instructions and closes out the ticket. The new automated process has reduced password reset tickets by 70%.

In addition, Zendesk’s trigger notifications help keep employees informed about the status of their tickets, minimizing back-and-forth communications. “When we send a ticket off to another department for further investigation or resolve a ticket, Zendesk automatically sends an update to the end user,” says Bedelis. “That keeps everyone in the loop about what’s going on.”

Supporting employees through multiple channels

“Zendesk’s built-in reporting makes it easy to track how many inquiries we’re receiving and our time to resolution,” Bedelis remarks. “We’re now in a much better position to allocate our resources effectively.”

As the team deploys its agents, Zendesk enables them to work from anywhere. “I was recently coming home from India, and I logged onto Zendesk in the airport to close out a couple of tickets,” says Bedelis. “That’s a great way to stay on top of the workload.”

VHA will continue to explore Zendesk’s Twitter integration as it looks for more ways to increase efficiency with Zendesk. But already, agents and internal customers alike are giving the system rave reviews.

“Our employees love Zendesk because the automated replies give them confidence that their issues are being managed,” says Bedelis. “Our agents love it because it offers the perfect balance of simplicity and power. I can’t recommend Zendesk enough – I’m a huge advocate. I think it’s the best piece of software we’ve ever used.”