Yammer is the leader in enterprise social networking, providing a secure way for employees at companies of all sizes, including more than 80% of the Fortune 500 to communicate, collaborate, and share information in real-time. It’s similar to Facebook, except the messages employees share with one another are restricted to inside the company or via private, secure external networks. The idea is to break down walls between different departments, so ideas, questions and answers can be shared instantaneously.

With social networking growing so rapidly in companies both large and small, Yammer has experienced tremendous growth internally and externally. The company has grown from 50 to 185 employees in the span of a couple years, while its user base has swelled to 3 million users.

Things move very quickly at Yammer, so when the company began researching a help desk solution, they knew it needed to be able to quickly scale to a fast-paced environment. It also had to be easy to use, but powerful, enabling them to become more efficient without having to hire an ever-expanding number of support agents. Facing a steadily increasing volume of support requests, they needed a tool that they could begin fully using right away without losing too much time for onboarding and training.

Zendesk fit the bill.

“It’s pretty amazing that our three-person team can support such a large user base and respond to between 1,800 and 2,000 tickets per month. We’re only able to do that because of Zendesk. There’s no way we could have done that through email, and the other solutions we looked at do not have the bandwidth for the large volume of support requests we manage.” Nic Tjader, technical support representative.

Intuitive Interface Makes It Easy to Get Started

What immediately impressed Tjader was that Zendesk’s interface was so intuitive. Its simplicity and minimal settings made it easy for agents to begin using it right away, without the need for custom programming, which can sometimes cost a company weeks of valuable time. Tjader had used other help desk systems before and found many of them to have such complex user-interfaces that it got in the way of agent productivity. With Zendesk, even those who had never used help desk software could get up and running with Zendesk within a couple of days, if not less.

Another advantage was the ability to create custom views that helped Yammer bring much-needed organization to their help desk. For instance, Zendesk’s out-of-the-box “views” let agents see all unread and open tickets. But Yammer was also able to create specialized views with Zendesk to show support requests from their Enterprise customers. Also helpful is the ability to “clone” a view, rather than having to start from scratch, allowing agents to quickly create additional views.

Zendesk has helped Yammer increase the efficiency of its help desk, but not at the cost of personalized support. Anything in Zendesk can be fine-tuned, so agents can provide support that feels human. For instance, agents can customize responses so that the subject line a user sees when a reply is sent is specific to their support issue.

Powerful Integrations

Yammer has also benefited from Zendesk’s extensive integration capabilities, such as its Twitter integration that turns tweets into support tickets, or “twickets.” They were able to integrate Zendesk with Twitter in just 30 minutes, providing an even faster degree of responsiveness to their customers.

“I love that we can integrate bit.ly into this feature as well so it automatically adds a shortened URL to a help desk ticket inside a tweet,” Tjader says, who adds that Yammer’s customers have had very positive feedback about being able to use Twitter as a support channel.

Yammer is also able to integrate their CRM information into their help desk thanks to Zendesk’s two-way integrations with SugarCRM and Salesforce, making it possible to view all the relevant customer support issues from within their CRM system and view the important customer account information from within Zendesk.

“I used to get called or IM’d by salespeople to get support information when they were on a sales call. Now the sales team can see all of that directly on their screen. So everyone has visibility into the most important information,” Tjader says.

Yammer also created a custom Javascript widget to integrate into Yammer’s internal database. This enables them to easily display additional account information such as their Yammer account information, number of users, and network information that can be helpful in diagnosing problems.

Features for Driving Efficiency

Part of Yammer’s strategy to deal with growing volume of support requests was to better enable customers to get answers themselves. To that end, Yammer has used Zendesk to create a customer support portal. Nearly 75% of Yammer’s support requests come through their customer service portal. Zendesk made it easy to get the portal up and running quickly and to add more content over time. Today, Yammer’s customer service portal has a knowledge base that includes approximately 100 articles written by the technical support team, covering a range of how-to topics, new features, and frequently asked questions. Getting customers to help themselves is a great way to make your help desk more efficient and curb the volume of support requests submitted to your help desk.

Since Yammer is a Software-as-a-Service, they naturally looked to have a cloud-based help desk system rather than a traditional on-premise system. Most of the software Yammer runs internally is also cloud-based, including Google applications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and file sharing within the Yammer interface. Yammer wanted to make sure that their help desk software could integrate with these applications as well as with their internally developed software.

Built to Be a Powerful Support Tool

As Yammer continues to use Zendesk, everyday it becomes more apparent how critical it is that companies use a support solution specifically designed to be a support solution. For instance, Tjader once tried to use another solution and it worked okay, but it wasn’t the product’s specialty. Having a help desk solution designed to specifically manage your help desk will only help support managers keep ahead of the curve and never be thrown off by their company’s support needs. Especially as Yammer’s number of Enterprise customers continues to grow, never has it been more important for them to have a support solution in place that will keep pace with the demands of premium customers and can quickly scale to meet their long-term goals, growth, and needs.