Audacy ups productivity with Zendesk’s AI-powered IT service

Audacy, Inc. is a leading audio content and entertainment company. They deliver entertainment and information across 230+ radio stations, premium podcasts, live events, and digital experiences that reach more than 200 million listeners each month.

Audacy’s reach with radio alone is massive, with 165 million listeners, equivalent to 90 percent coverage of the top 50 cities in the United States. Their podcasts attract over 38 million monthly listeners, and their digital audience exceeds 94 million each month. This work is supported by a team of thousands of dedicated professionals, including on-air talent, podcast hosts, marketing professionals, digital experts, engineers, and others.

Time for a change from the status quo

The Audacy IT team was looking to unify and scale service to employees with the Zendesk platform after several mergers and acquisitions had created a multi-platform and fractured service structure. It was critical for the new environment to be inclusive of the various business operations the growing company represented.

Enter Carl Carpenter, the business analyst and Zendesk administrator who’s now been working at Audacy for more than three years. He, along with managers and other infrastructure specialists, got to work to access a path forward.

Building a new future for internal IT service

After gathering feedback from across Audacy, the team built a flexible Zendesk foundation that could easily adapt, integrate, and scale, ready to keep pace with future growth and evolving business needs. The relaunch incorporated key IT service management (ITSM) functions such as:

– Change Management
– Access Provisioning
– Incident & Request Management
– Automated Approval Flows

“Relaunching Zendesk was the first step in us starting to really mature as an IT organization,” shares Carpenter. “We now have controls around things that never had controls before. And we also have an accurate look at what’s actually happening in our environment.”

Zero-touch automation for IT workflows

With the new Zendesk instance quickly set in place, Carpenter says this foundation made it simple to immediately onboard other Audacy teams and integrate key tools.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came with the integration of Myndbend Process Manager, which enabled zero-touch automation for complex IT access workflows. Built for ITSM, Myndbend automates multi-step processes such as onboarding, offboarding, and access provisioning by routing tickets through sequenced approvals, triggering actions in other systems, and updating records without human intervention.

“We just did our first sequenced approver flow with Myndbend and it’s an incredibly smooth workflow,” says Carpenter. “It goes through all the approvals, fires a webhook into another system, and closes.”

With Myndbend, Audacy now handles onboarding, offboarding, and access provisioning across dozens of systems through automated flows that require no IT intervention.

“The access management and approval processes through Myndbend have been a huge win for us,” adds Carpenter.

Mission-critical improvements

The improvements have transformed how the IT team supports both everyday employees and mission-critical departments like the Network Operations Center (NOC), which monitors live broadcasting uptime.

“The NOC team went from Google Form-based tickets basically to implementing them into Zendesk with highly complex workflows and automated alerts and reminders,” explains Carpenter. “It’s a night-and-day difference.”

These enhancements are more than operational wins—they’re business enablers. The NOC team, responsible for limiting off-air disruptions, now operates with 100 percent uptime expectations. The automated notifications allow team members to focus on more critical tasks.

AI-powered insights from Zendesk QA

Additionally, Zendesk’s AI-powered QA software has played a pivotal role in improving quality assurance processes for Audacy’s support team. The AI provides valuable insights into agent performance without the need to manually sift through long ticket threads.

“The real value from QA lies in seeing how we are doing with employee CSAT. Are our employees happy? Are we driving the right processes? That’s data we didn’t have before,” offers Carpenter.

Faster service and higher productivity = IT win

Since relaunching Zendesk with QA, automations, and the Myndbend integration, Audacy’s IT team has dramatically improved its service delivery with impressive results:

– 92 percent decrease in median time to resolution (from 34.6 hours to 2.7 hours)
– 19 percent increase in agent productivity
– 9 percent faster first-reply time
– 15 percent improvement in one-touch ticket resolutions

Carpenter says, “My personal mission is to make every employee’s job easier so they can move on to other tasks. I do that through Zendesk.”

Apparently, he is hitting his goal as employee feedback has been overwhelmingly positive about the new IT service delivery platform. “We support technical systems, but we support people first. What’s most important is making sure that we deliver a high level of service to our employees,” he adds.

Driving scalable ITSM with Zendesk

Audacy’s journey offers a roadmap for other organizations looking to scale internal service delivery.

“Zendesk has proved more than capable of filling Audacy’s current ITSM needs,” Carpenter stresses. “We are capitalizing on Zendesk’s strategic vision and strong foundation to scale for the future.”