Keeping our Karma While Leaving Zendesk

Admit it, you've got the song
stuck in your head at this moment.

Zendesk is woven into the DNA of our Service Delivery Model. Because it is simple, it helps provide us with the discipline that we use to provide great customer service.  In addition, our customer satisfaction survey results tell a story that I don't think many in our line of work can match.

Customers respond to 40% of our ticket satisfaction surveys.  I want to put this into perspective.  A great response rate on surveys of this type is 15%.  Ours is nearly 3 times that.  This is a feedback channel our customers are using.  It's working, and we need to keep that.

98% of the survey responses are positive.  Here's a sample from just this week.

"I am grateful that your service is available to me when I needed it."

"I was very happy with the support I received. Brandon was persistent in solving the problem to see it to resolution."

"The service we received was excellent. It is so nice to have people come to the lab and get us up and running in a short time. Dan is great person to work with. We appreciate all the work he has done with us over the past year at NCRC."

"Excellent service/assistance in every aspect during that morning; thanks to everyone!!!" 

But the 2% is important to us too.  We have a process we use internally to learn from our mistakes called "Code Blue".  Most of the time when we receive negative feedback, it's not because someone did a bad job, it's because there are problems with services, processes, or products.  We are using this information to help us improve.  Here's a sample of the comments we get.  These are related to services to which I am accountable, so I'm comfortable sharing here.

"I was told that there wasn't a courtesy phone in the classroom, but once I got there, there actually is a phone. The number is ###-####. Would have been nice to have so trainees could contact if they couldn't find the room."

"The only response I remember getting is the auto response one receives when a ticket is submitted. I didn't get support from anyone in MSIS. Apparently the issue resolved itself."

In the first case, it was simple, correct the information in the Room and Resource scheduling service. In the second case, it highlights a process and communications problem within MSIS that we are working to resolve.  Without the customer feedback though, we really wouldn't know that our customers are experiencing pain.

So why are we talking about leaving Zendesk?

We’ve received funding to support Zendesk, but we have an opportunity to use a product that will allow us to work towards implementing user support optimization and provide a significant cost savings.  The purpose of the survey I sent out was to make sure that when we do transition away, we keep the important elements that have helped us improve so much so far, like getting feedback from our customers.  Last week, I gave you the weighted list of business capabilities we needed.

We evaluated different products against these capabilities.  Each product's performance against each business capability was judged from a 1-5 Scale, 1 being terrible, and 5 being terrific.  0 for those who did not have the capability.

Product Scorecard

It's no surprise Zendesk comes out on top.  It's still the best fit for who we are. ServiceNow (in use by ITS) is a very close second, as is Atlassian's Service Desk, although the tools inhabit very different market niches.  Absolute Service is already in use as part of MiHarbor, so it's inclusion is a natural fit. However, it failed in some very important ways to us. Remedy can fulfill most of our business requirements, but it is saddled with decades of feature agglomeration so as to look like a Katamari.

But wait! What about (name of really awesome software)?

Other ticketing and ITSM solutions are out there, and I did look at a ton of them.  In the end, I decided that the rational thing to do was to look at products that are already in use institutionally in some capacity or another.

So, what's the decision?

We haven't made up our minds just yet.  At this point though, it's between ServiceNow and Atlassian Service Desk. If you have more to say, you know where I am, please let me know!