Omnichannel Help Desk

The consumer service team moved away from the ‘one email per contact’ paradigm to a Zendesk-based ‘one ticket per issue’ solution. It also facilitated and incorporated live chat into a single interface, maximising agents’ focus on helping customers. The following capabilities were identified:

1. Ticket management, categorisation, and automated ticket assignment,
2. Ticket allocation and organising by groups
3. Native support for multiple languages, and
4. Detailed reporting capabilities, with self-service reporting and automatic dashboard deliveries via email.

Over a series of workshops and discussions, the iMovo team collected Dr Schär’s requirements, explored the existing support process in detail, and proposed a support process that met those requirements. This bespoke support process and Zendesk design married Dr Schär’s requirements with best practices.

A key aim of iMovo’s solution design process was to develop a support process that could be easily expanded both vertically, to incorporate higher levels of escalations, as well as horizontally, such as for expanding into other markets.

The design, when signed off, was implemented on Zendesk Support for email ticketing, Zendesk Chat for Live Chat, and Zendesk Insights (now Explore) for reporting. The solution was tested extensively by Dr. Schär and iMovo, and both the members of the Consumer Service team and their team leaders and managers were given bespoke training sessions revolving around the best practices for using Zendesk for agents, and technical knowledge for building and maintaining Zendesk for the future.

The final component of this phase was the development of an extensive series of dashboards in Zendesk Insights to provide detailed insight into the consumer service team’s operations, allowing the team and company’s management to easily report on and compare:

• Customer satisfaction over time, per group, per agent, and across channels,
• Ticket first resolution and First reply time,
• Ticket volumes per channel, per period, and
• Agent activity is based on a number of comments, tickets handled, and time spent per individual or group, and a number of other metrics.

Multinational Expansion

Once the initial phase of the project was completed, iMovo expanded the help desk from Dr. Schär’s core team in Bolzano, Italy, to the rest of the company’s offices. This enhancement of the solution would require:

1. Development of additional, market-specific support processes, and
2. Launching new email and live chat channels

The support process implemented in Phase 1 was expanded further over the course of a number of small engagements to include all of Dr. Schär’s localised teams onto the same, single Zendesk platform. The work was carried out both by iMovo based on agreed requirements, as well as by Dr. Schär due to the extensive knowledge of Zendesk brought to the organisation.

Integration with MS Dynamics CRM

At the end of Phase 2, the consumer service team’s requirements for a ticketing system were satisfied, and the Zendesk platform was fully optimised to meet the needs of the team.

There was quite a degree of duplicate work as Dr. Schär employees would need to enter customer information and correspondence in one system (i.e. Zendesk) and then have to transfer to a second system (i.e. Microsoft Dynamics CRM) in order to maintain the two systems in a synchronised state. This manual process ran the risk that on very busy days, end-users might forget to re-enter the information on the second application, resulting in two systems that were out of synch with each other and denoting different information.

iMovo was asked to develop the ‘bridge’ through which data and information is entered into one core application but through the use of APIs and integration tools, the data would automatically be transferred to the second system without any human intervention.

This option also offered the opportunity to have two-way integration so data could flow from-to either application to the other on a real-time or timed basis. This integration ensured that the company would enjoy a genuine Customer 360-view of all interactions with clients. Every correspondence ‘from’ and ‘to’ the company can now be viewed across a unified console and the necessary action planned in a more strategic manner.