Vimeo taps Zendesk pro services for enterprise-level CX solution

Vimeo (NASDAQ:VMEO) is the world’s most innovative video experience platform, enabling anyone to create high-quality video experiences to connect better and bring ideas to life. With Vimeo, any professional, team, or organization can unlock the power of video to create, collaborate, and communicate.

It’s no wonder that Vimeo is trusted by more than 300 million creatives, entrepreneurs, and businesses, with more than 350,000 videos uploaded daily. Creators and collaborators worldwide can use Vimeo’s AI script generator and AI-powered editing to help generate new content even faster, and take care of all their video business on the mobile app.

In 2023, Vimeo’s Customer Support, Safety, and Experience Leadership team gathered in New York to discuss plans for the coming year and reflect on past achievements. A major topic on the agenda: “The Zendesk launch was one of our largest projects in many years,” recalls Minh Long, Vice President of Customer Support, Safety and Experience. “The overall success of the project can be attributed to the partnership, skill, and professionalism of the Zendesk folks. They made all the difference.”

Long is referring to the migration and optimization project known as PRISM, launched in 2022, which he sees as more of a collaborative Zendesk rebuild. Although Vimeo had been leveraging Zendesk since 2013, their CX needs were evolving as the company pivoted from being a niche, arthouse video platform to focusing more on the enterprise segment where consistency, quality, and professionalism are vital.

The PRISM project was designed to consolidate Vimeo’s configuration and workflows into a new Zendesk instance, with the goal of improving agent efficiency, making the system easier to maintain, and capturing valuable CX data. At the same time, Vimeo was changing its organizational support structure and completing a data migration from two existing instances, so there was a lot to coordinate.

Professional services make big projects possible

Initially, the scope and complexity of the PRISM project seemed daunting. “Because of the sheer immensity of this project and how many variables and intricate pieces there were to figure out, it was hard to know where to start,” recalls Noah Kardos-Fein, Director of Digital Support at Vimeo.

After interviewing several consulting firms, Vimeo ultimately aligned most with the structured, clear approach offered by the Zendesk professional services team.

“Our Zendesk engagement manager led us through the murkiness of that first month or two of gathering information, doing intensive interviews with each of us, and getting to know and understand the system,” Kardos-Fein says. “We ended up with a very organized checklist of everything that we needed to do, as well as a playbook and documentation. We’re in such a better place now.”

Partnering with Zendesk professional services gave Vimeo the tools, strategy, and expertise needed for a smooth implementation and successful launch.

Building a scalable solution from the ground up

The team inherited a Zendesk implementation built prior to 2015 that was highly customized and only maintained by one or two people. While the system was incredibly well-built and suited to the business five years ago, it required too much maintenance and troubleshooting when something went wrong.

In order to create a scalable and easy-to-use solution to streamline workflows and eliminate manual work, Vimeo decided to build a brand new Zendesk instance, all supported on the AWS platform.

Today, the company’s Customer Support team handles 54,000 monthly support tickets from its self-serve (consumer) customers and sales-assisted (enterprise) customers. Vimeo’s IT department also has 30 Zendesk users providing internal IT support.

In addition to using Zendesk Suite Enterprise for knowledge base, side conversations, and data reporting, Vimeo answers requests through email, chat, phone, and web tickets, and is evaluating video as a support channel. Next, the group plans to expand on features such as Single Sign-On, CSAT updates, and help center improvements, while also exploring Advanced AI and Zendesk WFM (formerly Tymeshift) workforce management.

Powering global support in five languages

Delivering exceptional support to 1.7 million subscribers in more than 190 countries is a tall order, so Vimeo operates global support teams in the U.S., Israel, India, and Ukraine. Agents rely on Language.io to provide translation services for non-English tickets, while help center content is available in five different languages. A major time saver: a Zendesk Integration with Smartling ensures that new articles are automatically translated by machine learning and reviewed by humans before publishing.

Integrations improve data sharing and documentation

Vimeo also takes advantage of Zendesk’s flexibility to connect its existing CRM, project management, and collaboration tools, which enables better data sharing.

“We integrate with Salesforce and other tools, so we’re able to collaborate with different resources and teams. We can provide them with actionable data and insights that we didn’t have before,” says Nir Ben Ari, Director of Systems and Technology for Customer Support, who led the PRISM Zendesk rebuild project for Vimeo. “The Salesforce integration unlocks a lot of information for our sales assisted users, and lets us pull all the information we need to drive business rules, triggers, and automations.”

“We can create dashboards for customer success and sales, and report on the bugs because we have a Jira integration. It has completely changed our work,” he says.

Other integrations used regularly include Slack for side conversations, and Solvvy as the primary chatbot deflection tool (soon to be Zoom Virtual Agent following an acquisition by Zoom).

Ben Ari was pleased to find that integrating with Zendesk did not require costly developer resources, and it made change management easier. “Now we have everything documented and we have our configuration workbook. We’re not afraid of making changes because we know how it is built and what needs to be done. This is amazing for us.”

A dedicated Zendesk service consultant for the win

In addition to having the professional services team working on the PRISM project, Vimeo also enlisted the help of a Zendesk Assist Managed Service Consultant to provide ongoing services support. The team discovered many benefits of working alongside a Zendesk expert. “The fact that you have someone from the Zendesk team dedicated to your account, and they know how the system is built, that’s extremely helpful. They can help with best practices and doing the actual configuration,” says Ben Ari. “We do have a dedicated Zendesk admin team, but the fact that one of them works for Zendesk and also knows how our business works is huge.”

On the digital support side, “It’s really useful to have somebody to help, whether we’re building a dashboard on the fly or adding triggers,” adds Kardos-Fein. “The Zendesk managed service consultant helped out a lot during that redesign project, migrating help articles and making sure that everything was organized. She helped fill in the gaps, especially where we didn’t have the resources or headcount to do that.”

Boosting confidence with a single source of truth

A primary objective of PRISM was to enhance stability, data availability, and accuracy because Vimeo’s legacy tools made it difficult to track and report on the team’s performance. Centralizing support data in Zendesk has truly empowered employees.

“We saw a boost in confidence across the team, agents, managers, in the stability of the system and the fact that there aren’t as many cracks for things to slip through,” Noah Kardos-Fein notes. “Whether you’re a frontline agent answering tickets, or you’re administering the system, it’s much easier to trust the numbers and know it’s an accurate reflection of how things are going. We now have a single source of truth.”

Easy tools make happy agents and customers

Minh Long has seen the agent experience greatly improve thanks to Zendesk’s customized dashboards and streamlined views. “We took the opportunity to redesign the agent-facing interface. Their lives have gotten so much easier and agent sentiment is sky high,” he says.

Now that Vimeo’s CRM is integrated with Zendesk, agents have clean visibility into all the queues, so they can understand SLAs and prioritize tickets. As a result, support has achieved a median first reply time of five hours and a median first resolution time of 16.6 hours.

“Our average CSAT is close to 90 percent and SLAs have gone up,” comments Long. “Before, the same business with less volume had a CSAT five to six points lower on average.”

After seeing great progress, Long believes the team will continue building on the positive momentum. “Not only did we lack good, reliable data, but our way of working changed from the day that we launched PRISM. We’re in a whole different realm.”