Do you need a Customer Service System? Experiences using Zendesk

This article was published by Checkout Finland Oy in Finnish at their blog. Article is republished and translated into English with the permission of Checkout Finland Oy.

"You can separately manage communications coming from different channels up to a certain limit. But when you have volume, the time saved by using a Customer Management Solution is significant."

"Zendesk has brought down the amount of tools we have to use at our Customer Service. At the same time we have been able to unify both the processes as well as our operating model across all of our services",  says Jenni Penna, Technical Customer Service Specialist at Checkout Finland

Good Customer Service gives a competitive edge for Finnish webshops

Modern customers expect they get their issues resolved in due time no matter what channel they use for contacting you. When you’re perplexed with the flood of emails, chats, social media and phone calls, to name a few, the end result is easily a communication chaos.

To tackle this chaos there are lots of different Customer Management solutions on the market. We here at Checkout Finland chose Zendesk for its broad and flexible reporting capabilities among other features. So what kind of problems has our Customer Management solution solved for us and who would need to consider using a Customer Management solution?

It is common to wonder if your own webshop has any chance of competing for customers against strong international rivals. There are however many tricks for turning this rivalry into your benefit. One of the key tricks is providing fast multichannel customer service with Finnish speaking experts.

-Key part of providing Excellent Customer Service is when you’re persuading a customer, who has endless options to choose from in the Internet, to buy and to come back and buy more from your webshop. Cheap prices are not at all the only relevant issue for the customer, says VP Sales Marko Kallovaara from Pepron, a Zendesk reseller and consultation company.

– When, for example, within the first few minutes in to browsing your webshop you proactively present clever context related help to your webshop customer they remember this “Wow!” moment and are most probably returning again, and again. Customers are drawn to comfort, states Henrik Heusala, VP Collaboration Services, from Pepron.

Webshop needs to help their customers when they hesitate.

– For example when the customer has collected their shopping cart full but has been idle for three minutes since, the customer might be comparing your prices and items to the offering of another webshop. This is one of the essential moments when your Customer Service should be online and ask the customer what issues they are still unsure about. This is the moment when sales are closed, continues Kallovaara.

 

Need for a Customer Service System depends on your volume

When you’re assessing whether a Customer Management Solution is necessary for your webshop, the key issues are company’s size, different service channels offered and especially how many people are communicating with your customers. Do you have different teams and tiers/levels?

– When you need to assign messages between teams so that the customer service representatives can keep track of what they do as a team transparently, a Customer Management Solution solves many problems. Then again, if you have one person managing all of your customer service you don’t need a system, states Jenni Penna, Technical Customer Service Specialist at Checkout Finland.

– You can separately manage communications coming from different channels up to a certain limit. But when you have volume, the time saved by using a Customer Management Solution is significant, Penna continues.

So how do you choose the best option for your Webshop? It depends a lot on your specific needs. Henrik Heusala from Pepron offers one universally applicable hint:

– It is definitely worthwhile to make sure it’s possible to integrate your existing systems, as well as the systems you’re planning on using in the future with your chosen Customer Management Solution, especially systems related to sales and marketing.

Zendesk has helped Checkout Finland Customer Service

Without Zendesk, Checkout Finland’s Customer Service would need to use several different systems with no links between them. Certain necessary information would often have to be searched from these systems separately.

– Zendesk has brought down the amount of tools we have to use at our Customer Service. At the same time we have been able to unify both the processes as well as our operating model across all of our services, says Penna.

– When our customer asks the status of their issue through whatever channel they choose to use, we don’t have to browse through separate systems and places to find the conversation history and previous contacts with the specific customer. With Zendesk we just open the profile of the customer and find all old conversations and emails from the same place at once, praises Penna.

Zendesk: Top 5 features

Zendesk puts your issues in order and solves the communication chaos. Time is saved, there are fewer mistakes made and customer service is faster. This transforms directly into an overall better Customer Experience.

In our Day-to-Day work at Checkout the following 5 features have so far helped us the most:

  • We use different teams and tiers/levels at our customer service. Zendesk provides transparency so everyone is onboard on what your team and your colleagues are working on.
  • Zendesk automatically sends customer satisfaction inquiries which give us direct and prompt feedback on how we handle customer issues. If in the customer’s opinion an  issue is still unresolved, it’s easy to get back to the issue and gracefully make sure we are over the finish line this time.
  • The ability to create, save and use ready made answers, or “Macros”, makes customer service work faster. “Macros” are a handy way of delivering, for example, some frequently needed instructions to our customers.
  • Reporting shows us which type of contacts and questions are challenging, have taken a long time or what type of issues we have been receiving the most among other things. This is used in pinpointing and handling problem areas in our services.
  • Reporting improves customer service across the board: Once you have the knowledge you can change your operating models and, for example, make better instructions for your customer service personnel.

Zendesk is a fit for a variety of different webshops, but Zendesk is especially good when your need is to manage large amounts of customer service inquiries from consumers. Zendesk also offers wide and flexible integration possibilities to other systems

About Checkout Finland Oy

Specializing on payment transactions Checkout Finland Oy is a part of OP Financial Group. Checkout Finland Oy enables easy, fast and safe net payments for web shops as well as for all digital services.

This article is originally published as a blog post in Finnish at Checkout Finland Blog