Virgin Pulse + Zendesk: Eliminating siloed support

The business world has long recognized that providing excellent customer service plays a key role in achieving success, but increasingly companies have begun to understand just how important it is to keep another valuable resource happy: employees.

Whether it’s helping employees stay active and eat better, thus lowering healthcare costs, or building a great company culture in order to drive business performance, companies often need a little help. That’s where Virgin Pulse comes into play: the company’s platform, which includes a web portal and mobile applications, integrates with third-party activity trackers such as Fitbit, Garmin, and Max Buzz, Virgin Pulse’s own device, and helps companies set up reward programs that encourage healthy and sustainable behavior change.

Growth forces new solutions

“We really are a software company at the forefront,” said Mike Clericuzio, Director of Service Support for Virgin Pulse. “The software gives members the opportunity to focus on their health and wellness including their physical activity, nutrition, mental and financial well-being. Our platform provides members with daily successes that lead to improved overall well-being.”

When Clericuzio joined Virgin Pulse, he saw a company dedicated to high customer service standards, but that was being held back by an inefficient homegrown CRM and outsourced member services. As the company’s products and services expanded, and enterprise customers, including a number of Fortune 100 organizations began to come aboard, it became clear that a dedicated customer service solution was needed.

“All I ever heard when I was doing interviews with clients and internal staff was that there was never any follow-up,” Clericuzio said. “Things fell into a black hole. There was no way to really look at any open case activities, trends, and communication to and from the client.”

Those issues were compounded by Virgin Pulse’s growing global presence, with three brands to promote, and acquisitions of two companies. Choosing Zendesk as Virgin Pulse’s omnichannel solution helped the company get a handle on these issues, Clericuzio said.

Scaling with Zendesk Suite

“It was a very easy transition. I just used the Multibrand feature to create new brands within Zendesk Support,” he explained. “It makes it so much easier for me and my agents to be able to work those tickets. We took those silos, broke them down, and added everything into Zendesk. So now I have all my reporting, all of my activities, all of my satisfaction details—all that important information—right at my fingertips, in one system.”

Virgin Pulse’s omnichannel solution includes Zendesk Support, Chat, and Guide—rolled out to about 50 internal users and integrated with Salesforce. The company’s phone provider, Evolve, has also been integrated with Zendesk so that calls are logged in Zendesk and agents can see any other Zendesk activity for the caller, or can create a new profile in Zendesk if it’s the client’s first contact.

“It provides a more seamless transaction for the members, so they don’t have to go, ‘Oh, I have to go into this system if I want to create a challenge for employees,” Clericuzio said. “And, ‘Okay, if I have an issue, I have to go over to this system.’ Now they can do it all in Zendesk, which acts as a gatekeeper—and we’re ready to go.”

The newly-added ability to chat, and to access everything from one system, has led to a satisfaction rating of 93 percent, up from 85 percent. Clericuzio and his team have also been able to shift volume between channels, away from email. They have reduced email volume down from 34 percent of total volume to 20 percent, thanks to live chat and self-service.

Initially, Virgin Pulse saw ticket volume disperse equally between email, phone, and chat, but deflecting emails through live chat and self-service has become a priority. The team has so far found that chat has had the largest effect on lowering ticket volume, but the team is always working to evolve their help center articles in Zendesk Guide to provide answers to questions about navigation and how the rewards programs works.

It’s also important to provide this support in a variety of languages. The team is researching the need of rolling out help articles in a various languages. “That’s a huge piece of what we do,” Clericuzio said. “As we are growing globally, providing multilingual support is becoming mandatory.”

Because Virgin Pulse’s customer base consists of other businesses, adhering to SLAs remains a crucial element in the company’s customer service.

“Having the ability to break that up by client using the SLA feature within Zendesk, and then to report on those, has saved a lot of time and effort,” said Clericuzio, who added that Virgin Pulse’s SLA adherence stands at 99 percent. “It shows our hand to the client, as well. We can say, ‘This is what we can provide to you,’ and then we exceed that.”