
Conservice ups service quality and cuts costs with Zendesk workforce tools
Conservice needed to reduce costs, but worried that a smaller support team would negatively affect service levels. With the AI-driven capabilities of Zendesk WFM and Zendesk QA, the company optimized agent scheduling, enabling it to function with 40 percent less staff, improve service, and recognize agents for their excellent work.

“Zendesk WFM helped us determine what type of FTE we need for each part of each day, so we can meet the expected response times for emails and hit the expected hold times for chat and phone.”
Jesse Barlow
Senior Team Lead, Customer Service at Conservice
“With our previous solution, we would’ve had to upgrade to a more expensive premium package to get the same functionality we now have with Zendesk WFM. We got a better deal with Zendesk, and the reporting, scheduling, and forecasting features are so helpful.”
Jesse Barlow
Senior Team Lead, Customer Service at Conservice
Company Headquarters
River Heights, Utah
Utility bills processed annually
22M
Employees
2K+
US Locations
10
22
Hours saved/month
15,000
Support tickets/week
+7%
Increase in IQS
96%
IQS
Utah-based Conservice provides full-service utility management to the real estate industry. It currently has 7.9 million service points, including family homes, student housing, manufactured housing, and commercial and military properties.
Conservice has also been a Zendesk customer since 2012 when it replaced its homegrown, email-based technology with Zendesk Suite. The company had just hired its 500th employee, and the upgrade supported the growing business and helped scale its customer service.
Lacking a premium WFM platform
By 2023, the Conservice customer service team was handling roughly 15,000 customer interactions a week via phone and Zendesk-integrated chat and email systems. To manage support operations, the company used a base package of Assembled, a workforce management platform.
But the Assembled system didn’t integrate well with Zendesk Suite. And to get the critical reporting, forecasting and scheduling capabilities, Conservice would have to pay for a premium package.
Senior Team Lead Jesse Barlow, who oversees the customer service department, elaborates: “We needed to know how many hours we had scheduled for phone calls, chats, and emails. But those reports weren’t available with our package, so we had to manually download the data and run our own calculations. It was time consuming because the agents’ shifts vary week to week. We’d also have to upgrade to get forecasting functionality.”
Conservice wasn’t actively looking to replace its Assembled system until the Zendesk account manager mentioned Zendesk WFM (Workforce Management).
“I was immediately interested,” recalls Barlow. “Knowing that Zendesk had a solution made the switch pretty easy.”
Saving time with automated scheduling
The transition to Zendesk WFM was a smooth and speedy process. “We got a better deal with Zendesk WFM,” says Barlow. “It adds a layer of functionality we didn’t have before, and the reporting, scheduling, and forecasting features are so helpful.”
Today, Conservice uses Zendesk WFM to automatically generate schedules and forecasts based on its ticket volume, saving the customer support team roughly one hour per day, or 22 hours a month.
“Now we can easily create a schedule for every single person,” adds Barlow. “We only have to update it once and Zendesk WFM regenerates the schedules. It’s a big time saver.”
Measuring productivity with better reporting
Conservice also takes advantage of the robust reporting in WFM. For example, with a point report, it can analyze assigned points (tickets assigned to an agent) versus solved points (tickets an agent has solved) for a better picture of agent productivity, even if adherence rates appear low.
“We have people who go back and forth between programs, or work out of two screens at the same time,” Barlow explains. “This can affect their adherence rates. With points, we can see that they completed all of the work they were assigned, even if they’re out of adherence.”
Barlow also tracks agents’ productive time versus unproductive time so he can more accurately calculate performance based only on active working hours.
He adds, “With Zendesk, we can see a breakdown of each agent’s day and their scheduled time. If they have any unproductive time, we can adjust it so we’re only calculating performance based on when they’re actually handling phone calls, emails, or chats.”

Scheduling agents based on demand
With forecasts generated by Zendesk WFM, Conservice allocates agents based on inbound volumes and channels.
“Before, we didn’t have the option of generating reports based on the forecast,” says Barlow, “so we had some agents with very low assign points while others had too many. Now with Zendesk WFM, we have people scheduled where we need them, so we can handle the volume at the right time. It helped us determine what type of FTE we needed for each part of each day.”
The company used the new insight to balance its support team, reorganizing so it could function with 40 percent less staff. Still, productivity per agent, measured by handled points, jumped roughly 67 percent. “Now the assigned points are more balanced,” adds Barlow.
Evaluating interactions with auto QA
An ongoing effort for Conservice is to evaluate support interactions so that it can continually improve service levels. For this, it deployed Zendesk Quality Assurance (QA) software, a solution that integrates data from Conservice’s AI agents and voice interactions. In just two months of using the software, the company’s Internal Quality Score (IQS) improved to 97 percent.
In the past, the QA process involved team leaders manually selecting and scoring emails. And although the HR group had their own scorecard, it didn’t align well with the specific needs of the customer service department.
Today, the company accesses reports and reviews conversations within the same Zendesk platform. Auto QA pulls out specific conversations based on conditions like spelling and grammar, empathy, and solution offered, simplifying the process.
For Barlow, auto QA is what makes Zendesk stand out. “With the auto QA reports, I can see the different scores, the root causes, and the frequency of those root causes,” Barlow notes. “That’s a big deal. My other favorite feature is how easy it is to review those conversations just by pulling up the side panel and the way it scores every conversation or phone call.”
Optimizing operations with WEM
By integrating its Zendesk WFM instance with Zendesk QA, Conservice gained a complete Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solution that the team uses to optimize operations and improve the quality of its customer service.
Barlow looks forward to even more improvements as Conservice continues to leverage the solution.
“We’ve just scratched the surface of all the great things that Zendesk workforce management can do,” he concludes. We’re showcasing how well QA works so we can push the rest of Conservice to Zendesk. And our next plan is to dive deeper and make better use of everything that we have available.”