Wondersign swaps Intercom for Zendesk's omnichannel CX

In 2002, Wondersign (at the time known as Apexis) started its journey in Switzerland as a digital media agency. When the company’s small and medium-sized business customers asked for an easy-to-use digital signage tool, Wondersign decided to build its own after evaluating more than 200 different solutions and finding them all to be too complex or falling short of the requirements.

In 2009, Wondersign launched its digital signage solutions supporting a mix of retailers, public safety organizations, health care providers, and schools. The company’s work with furniture stores led to the discovery of a need for a digital in-store catalog solution for specialty retailers. That’s when “Catalog Kiosk” was introduced in 2015. This digital catalog application for touch-screen, endless-aisle kiosks, and tablets is used by thousands of retailers worldwide today.

Wondersign has grown into a complete end-to-end SaaS platform that connects retailers to their suppliers and vendors, linking product and inventory data to major eCommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. A key benefit is keeping the omnichannel in-store and online experiences in sync across multiple sales channels. Wondersign’s catalog management allows retailers to feed always-current product information both online and in-store. This bulk editing ecommerce solution helps retailers make changes to multiple products and product variants at the same time; including pricing, inventory, and product catalogs.

Replacing Intercom with a best of breed CX solution

Despite getting its start as a Zendesk customer, Wondersign had migrated to Intercom during a period of rapid growth and eventually hit limitations that inhibited the team’s ability to provide great customer experiences. For example, the legacy Intercom system functioned primarily as a marketing initiative but fell short on customer support features, lacking strong conversation management capabilities for merging tickets and posing integration issues that led to ghost tickets.

In the process of expanding its services and product offerings, the team also realized the crucial need for a more flexible, scalable CX system–and the transformation began.

Faced with a piecemeal solution, the company began evaluating other options. “I was most impressed by Zendesk’s capabilities, specifically the addition of voice support and the integrations needed to consolidate our tools,” says Wondersign’s Chief Revenue Officer Kaspar Fopp.

Quick and easy deployment sets Wondersign up for success

The team got up and running on the new platform in just 24 hours without any disruption to business. In fact, switching to Zendesk was such a fast, smooth process that Fopp says he hardly remembers the implementation.

Now Zendesk is used companywide by all 45 employees on the CX, billing, sales, and marketing teams, which has streamlined internal processes and communication, while significantly reducing silos between departments. Wondersign provides full omnichannel support through talk, text, social, email, and knowledge base, as well as chat integrations with the company website and portal.

“The goal is to ensure that we are available on whatever channel is best for the customer, so we can meet them where they’re at,” says Fopp.

Prioritizing retention with customer-first experiences

Expanding into the world of digital product catalogs gave Wondersign a powerful new way to help retailers stand out in a sea of competitors and grow their business. Wondersign deals heavily with SMB customers, a sector in which preventing churn is a real concern.

As a result, leveraging reliable CX to support customer retention is of utmost importance to Wondersign. “The impact of a negative support experience cannot be underestimated. It might be the one thing that pushes a customer over the edge,” says Fopp.

Omnichannel support drives collaboration and efficiency

The switch to omnichannel support has been a huge game changer, providing Wondersign with a solution that helped transform their CX processes. Now that team members can access 360-degree customer views, cross-functional collaboration has improved.

“It’s critical that agents on the front lines have a full picture of each customer interaction and are equipped to solve issues as efficiently as possible,” Fopp says. “Zendesk integrations provide great visibility into the business and help drive over 84 percent one-touch interactions.”

According to Fopp, “The Salesforce integration is as good as it gets and second to none. It’s super easy to set up and keeps account managers in the loop from the very first conversation.” Wondersign also uses integrations with Jira to link bugs, Chargebee to view subscriptions, and Upscope for screen sharing.

The customer’s perception of Wondersign has also improved since agents started using Zendesk. Instead of describing their support experience as equivalent to “dealing with the IRS,” customers now enjoy faster, more efficient responses.

Zendesk consolidation and scalability reduces total cost of ownership

For a company dedicated to excellent CX, the reliability that Zendesk provides cannot be understated. Word of mouth opinions and recommendations play a huge role in the SMB community (negative buzz can wreak havoc on small businesses), so it’s especially important that Wondersign is able to provide consistent and available support.

Zendesk also scored points with the team for reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). After struggling with another system, Wondersign understands that the costs of running an unreliable and inefficient solution go well beyond licensing and add up quickly.

Before switching over to Zendesk, the company lost time and money from dropped calls and agents stopping support to fix a webhook or technical issue. It took longer to accomplish tasks without access to full customer views.

“With Zendesk omnichannel support, we no longer need additional pieces of software to fill product gaps, such as Aircall for talk support,” explains Fopp. Wondersign found the ultimate CX platform to serve its own multi-channel commerce solution.

And the transformation occurred just in time to support the company’s global growth, empowering Wondersign team members across the U.S. and throughout Europe, Asia, Central and South America to deliver exceptional support, end to end.