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How Qualia uses GenAI to radically elevate its CX
Qualia was eager to adopt generative AI for customer support, but was working with too many point solutions to optimize AI’s potential. After replacing many of them with Zendesk Suite and Advanced AI, Qualia radically improved its CX, increasing help center usage by 91 percent and slashing first response times by 75 percent.
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"We switched from Salesforce's Service Cloud to Zendesk in large part because of GenAI functionality, but it's been a huge win outside of that. I'm optimistic that we might be able to add 1-2 pts of margin from the operational improvements enabled by this switch."
Nate Baker
Chief Executive Officer at Qualia
“Zendesk AI definitely exceeded my expectations on how quickly we saw deflection and productivity gains. The most dramatic impacts we’ve seen are with response times, the after-call work, and general volume."
Brian Thome
Vice President of Customer Success at Qualia
Company Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Annual Transactions
1M+
Serving
1M+ real estate professionals
Company founded
2015
75%
Reduced response times
20%
Cost savings
30%
Decrease in daily ticket volume
91%
Increased help center usage
The homebuying journey can be fraught with complications, stress, and confusion for buyers and real estate professionals alike. Qualia, the leading digital real estate closing platform, is changing that by bringing efficiency and transparency to what is often the largest purchase of someone’s life.
Qualia’s mission is to make buying a home a simple, secure, and enjoyable experience by replacing siloed, paper-based processes with modern, digital transactions and a shared system of record. The company serves more than a million real estate and mortgage professionals and processes over one million transactions annually.
The trickle-down effect of customer service
Qualia is also in the service business because its customers, many of which are title companies, are service businesses themselves.
As Vice President of Customer Success Brian Thome describes it, title companies work in a highly competitive space. They win and lose business based on the quality and speed of their work and the client experience they provide.
He elaborates: “If a customer has trouble with our product, like generating a document, they may have to reschedule a closing. This could hurt their relationship with the realtor or loan officer who brought them the business. So our service is about making sure there are no delays, and that our customers look good in front of their customers.”
To optimize its customer service, Qualia was eager to adopt generative AI. The company envisioned using AI to help customers and agents find answers in its knowledge base of 700+ articles. The team also wanted to automate time-consuming tasks like intelligent triage and intent assignment.
Too much IT fragmentation to optimize AI
In 2023, to identify problems and areas of opportunity, the company conducted a state of support analysis, led by Senior Customer Success Operations Analyst, Sarah Cullerton. At the time, Qualia’s support tech stack consisted of a variety of point solutions, including Salesforce. Its knowledge base was built in WordPress.
Cullerton’s analysis uncovered a highly fragmented infrastructure and siloed data, resulting in obstructed 360-degree views into operations and customers, and overly cumbersome case workflow processes. Training and onboarding new agents on the various point solutions had also become too costly and time consuming.
Salesforce presented its own set of challenges. At Qualia, updating permissions is strictly limited to highly trained administrators, who are busy managing the entire system for multiple teams. “So any updates or changes we needed required waiting for them to be available,” explains Cullerton, “which heavily slowed our ability to regularly update our processes and adjust our technical infrastructure.”
In addition, the company’s technical debt in Salesforce Service Cloud had accumulated from years of different admins building point solutions, and it was also paying more for all these separate tools. For Qualia, the tech analysis was a turning point.
“We had to decide,” says Cullerton. “Do we overhaul what we have, or lift and shift into another suite solution with programs that are all deeply connected and provide our agents and customers a coherent experience?”
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Lifting and shifting to Zendesk Suite and AI
In July 2024, after a careful vetting process, Qualia deployed Zendesk AI, Zendesk’s native voice solution, Zendesk Suite, and Zendesk Workforce Management. The team recognized that, in the era of AI, Zendesk offered a complete solution for CX leaders, plus the agility and automation it could not get from Salesforce.
“Zendesk is clearly built to match support processes,” says Cullerton. “Some of our data points, and the custom metrics and fields that would have taken us a lot of time to build, exist in Zendesk, out of the box. We don’t have to put any work into it.”
Cullerton and Director of Customer Support, Bayleigh Ackman, led the implementation supported by the Zendesk professional services team.
“The Zendesk team was phenomenal,” adds Ackman. “They made sure we were on track and drove the project along. We moved fast and stayed nimble throughout the implementation process. Launch day went fantastic.”
For Qualia, change management was the secret sauce. “We looped in the agents early in the process,” Ackman explains, “giving them biweekly updates and building out time to share their feedback. We also had a rigorous training plan for everyone. By getting their buy-in early, we boosted morale and created a tighter knit team.”
Qualia integrated Zendesk with Salesforce CRM to provide agents with a single view of customers and manage SLAs. The team also integrated JIRA so that agents could see escalations in one place instead of having to monitor tickets in two separate systems.
Cullerton appreciates how quick and easy it is to configure Zendesk. “As someone who has administered other ticketing systems, configuring and setting up things like automation and ticket views in Zendesk is so easy and fast,” she says. “Previously, it took us multiple quarters just to get ticket SLAs up and running. With Zendesk, we configured it within minutes.”
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Double-digit CX improvements
Since deploying Zendesk, Qualia has dramatically improved the quality of its customer service and support: daily ticket volume decreased 30 percent, first response times are down by as much as 75 percent, and after-call work was cut more than 50 percent.
The company credits these improvements, in part, to its new AI-powered help center and customers’ increasing ability to self-serve answers. The former help center sat in WordPress with a weak search function and suboptimal user interface, and provided limited insight into its effectiveness.
By contrast, customers today can easily find answers to their questions in Qualia’s carefully curated articles. Plus, Qualia has unprecedented visibility. For instance, the team saw that in the first 30 days, 99 percent of articles in the knowledge base were referenced. And by September 2024, customers were using the knowledge base 91 percent more than they did in July.
Agents handle queries fast and more efficiently too, with first response times dropping from roughly 144 minutes to 34 minutes.
For Thome, a helpful tool is Zendesk intelligent triage, an AI-powered feature that automatically predicts the intent, language, and customer sentiment for new tickets. “We’ve fully automated triage so cases can now route directly to the right agent based on the customer or topic,” he explains. “It’s helped us further reduce response times and increase our efficiency.”
Zendesk also helps reduce the workloads of Qualia’s agents. Within just 15 minutes of transitioning the team, the call transcription and summarization capabilities of Zendesk’s native voice solution shaved off more than half of their after-call work.
“The first time the agents saw it, they were absolutely shocked,” recalls Cullerton. “Our calls are pretty long so documenting them took a lot of time. Now, we’re more responsive to emails and agents focus on first-response to incoming cases.”
Kudos from one CEO to another
Moving forward, Qualia is taking advantage of its new-found visibility and reporting capabilities to manage current operations and identify the next rounds of optimization.
In the meantime, Zendesk has delivered such significant improvements so quickly, it compelled Qualia’s CEO Nate Baker to send a note directly to Tom Eggemeier, Chief Executive Officer at Zendesk.
Baker writes: “We switched from Salesforce’s Service Cloud to Zendesk in large part because of GenAI functionality, but it’s been a huge win outside of that. In the few weeks since [using] Zendesk, we’ve cut our support volumes by 30 percent and rolled off of a half dozen other point solutions we had integrated into Salesforce.
“I’m optimistic that we might be able to add one to two points of margin from the operational improvements enabled by this switch.”