Optimizely tailors support with custom objects and APIs

Optimizely’s vision is to empower people to unlock their digital potential. The category creator for web experimentation now has a vast portfolio of industry-leading digital experience solutions that allow businesses to orchestrate the entire content lifecycle, monetize each experience, and experiment across all customer touchpoints.

These solutions make up what is today known as the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform, used by product and marketing teams worldwide to create and optimize personalized experiences.

Optimizely is also committed to providing “white glove” service throughout the customer journey. Combining a customer-centric approach with powerful digital technology helped rocket the SaaS company to new heights as a global enterprise that now serves more than 10,000 customers and 700 partners.

Scaling up to enterprise level

With that growth came the need for enterprise-level tools that could support a global workforce and be tailored to different teams and processes. Optimizely discovered that Zendesk could scale along with its business, no matter how complex the needs of the organization became.

The B2B company started using Zendesk in 2014 and now leverages the platform for external support across multiple departments. Their Suite Enterprise setup includes ticketing, help center, voice, and chat capabilities for more than 200 total agents, with 160 agents on Support alone. Moving forward, the team plans to explore Messaging and Advanced AI, as well.

“The growth of both Zendesk and Optimizely have worked really well to put us on a path of product features that we need for our business,” says Andrew Schreiner, Director of Customer Success Operations at Optimizely.

Zendesk’s scalability proved essential for a company that now has nearly 1,500 employees and offices in 11 countries, including the U.S., Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Bangladesh, and the U.A.E.

Flexible tools, faster in-house changes

After working in various departments at Optimizely since 2008, Schreiner has nine years of experience using Zendesk that he brings to his role leading the global customer success team. As the company’s one and only technical contact, he is responsible for systems maintenance and development, which includes building an array of apps on Zendesk Marketplace.

Thanks to Zendesk’s recent innovations, powerful APIs, and custom objects, the Optimizely team has been able to build the tools they needed–without involving outside developers or moving teams to a new platform.

“Up until custom objects were released, we didn’t have a way to enhance Zendesk the way that we do now,” explains Schreiner. “If we wanted to make those enhancements, we would have needed a completely custom option from a third party vendor.”

Previously, Schreiner had to update certain reporting fields on a weekly basis, when team members joined or changed positions. With the new custom objects and UI interface, he can set permissions so other leaders can go in, manage their properties, or make changes whenever they want.

That functionality is built into the product, so more standard admins have the power to deploy custom objects, which is a huge time saver. To quote Schreiner, “It’s nice to be able to say, ‘Hey, you can go build this object. You don’t need me to code something in the backend.’”

Custom objects for every use case

Since custom objects are so flexible, Optimizely was able to create tools that aligned with its unique workflows, team structure, and permissions. That customizability is vital to support the Technical Support and Managed Services functions within Customer Success, as well as the unique use cases that Schreiner helps manage in Accounts Payable and Order Management.

“Custom objects are a critical piece to our business and how we work. It’s made people’s lives a lot easier and helps us work more efficiently across the board,” Schreiner says.

For example, Optimizely was part of Zendesk’s beta testing for custom objects when the team first started configuring the system for entitlement tracking. Today, the company uses Gainsight integrated with Zendesk to show each customer’s product usage and support needs.

When it comes to deployment scheduling, the team counts on APIs and custom properties to store additional information or ticket fields, and surface up a scheduling calendar for each team. Tracking billing and generating invoices is also a breeze, since the team added a custom app for those functions.

New time-saving customizations & collaboration

Creating tools in house not only saved time and resources, but also helped the company unlock new opportunities to boost efficiency, streamline collaboration, and save invaluable time. Now, custom objects are integrated throughout Optimizely’s service operations for routing, internal checklists, and onboarding.

“Custom objects help us store information and inject it into tickets,” notes Schreiner. “This allows us to route tickets effectively, know who should be working on them, and see who we should reach out to when there’s an issue.”

Using an app in Agent Workspace, the team can then create internal checklists that only allow agents to close a ticket once all the tasks are completed.

Custom objects are also used for storing ticket reviews, which adds ease and transparency to the onboarding process. Any agent can review tickets handled by other agents in training to see how they processed tickets and help flag issues. And, leaders can set permissions to ensure that users only have access to ticket reviews for their assigned groups.

“Custom objects give us the confidence in knowing that everything is being updated in a uniform way, everything is displayed in a uniform way, and people are working the same across the board, making it an efficient use of everybody’s time,” Schreiner says.

Extensible beyond expectation

The Optimizely team can embrace future growth and changes knowing that they have a robust and reliable CX system unifying their teams and their tech stack. Zendesk’s open, flexible platform makes it easy to build bespoke service experiences on top of an industry-leading ticketing system.

As Schreiner says, “The core product, the ticketing functionality, that’s been top notch all along. But the ability to extend further into our own business needs is the direction we need to be taking with our product and our Zendesk usage.”

Following that strategy, Optimizely now has more than 20 custom apps in Zendesk, at least half of which use custom objects to store data or move data around.

“Custom objects have afforded us the necessary ability to enhance Zendesk beyond what we were able to do before. It enabled us to store whatever we wanted in the product, and not be limited to the core, out-of-the-box function,” adds Schreiner. That extensibility has been the “biggest savior” in his mind. “We’ve pushed the limits of the product, and probably beyond in some facets, but Zendesk has always been able to keep up with what we needed.”