Prezi + Zendesk: A culture of customer-centric collaboration

When times are tough, some companies show what they’re made of. Take Prezi, a leading presentation software company that experienced a sudden surge in usage as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted schools and workplaces.

Facing a daunting transition to remote work and learning, millions turned to the company’s cloud-based presentation software to share lessons and ideas. Named for the short form of the word presentation in Hungarian, Prezi has 250 employees across its offices in Budapest, Berlin, Riga, and its San Francisco headquarters. With compelling visuals in place of traditional slides, Prezi helps make it easier for people to connect and develop ideas—perfect for remote work and education.

“Zendesk helped us understand, keep up with, and predict the needs of our users.” Anita Plesiu, Director of Global Customer Support at PreziSince launching its flagship program, Prezi Present, in 2011, its 100 million active users have created over 400 million presentations. From the start, Prezi has relied on Zendesk to support the 11,000 tickets and 400,000 help center views the company sees every month. And as the business grew, Zendesk scaled with it, giving the company flexibility to adapt as it added to its stable of products, providing metrics, AI and automation capabilities, seamless integration with other business tools, and a unified omnichannel experience for agents.

That partnership with Zendesk—as well as the company’s rich culture of team-oriented collaboration—helps Prezi rise to challenges, and make the best of opportunities.

A timely launch of video

With video’s increasing importance in business and education, the company launched Prezi Video in fall 2019 with the expectation that users would gradually adopt the new service as they discovered its capabilities. While customers did begin adopting Prezi Video, what started as a normal software launch soon turned into something else entirely.

“Launching a new product line usually takes a lot of effort, a lot of work,” said Daniel Kovacs, a six-year Prezi veteran who was recently promoted to customer support manager. “However, it was pretty simple because Zendesk provided all the tools for us to make changes and make sure that we’re correctly routing specific questions related to each different product.”

In March 2020, ticket volumes spiked by 5,000 requests per month (a rate that slowed a little during summer break and picked up again once school returned). Providing support for a new product is challenging enough during normal times, but with the pandemic, many of those tickets were for Prezi Video.

“We had ticket prioritization based on the products, so we knew what to jump on and we knew that Prezi Video got a huge increase,” Kovacs said. “We already had everything in one place to focus our attention. So everything came together. We were well prepared.”

A culture that shines during turbulent times

Prezi’s adept handling of a challenging support situation—the launching of a new product followed shortly by a disruptive pandemic—can be traced back to the company’s culture. Since its founding in 2011, Prezi has nurtured a collaborative environment in which customer service remains a top priority and employees lean on each other for support.

And that’s not just talk. Although Prezi has 25 agents working support, everyone at the company—including the founders, managers, and the CEO—regularly provides customer support directly to users.

That company-wide commitment to customer service has been assisted from the beginning by Zendesk. Throughout the partnership, Zendesk has helped Prezi understand its customers’ needs from support and its products. As its users’ experiences have matured and questions grew increasingly complex, the data and feedback from Zendesk have helped guide product development and Prezi’s approach to support. The data insights have even helped the company anticipate the needs of customers at a time when rapid and helpful responses have never been more needed.

“The word predict has never been more relevant or important than in this year,” said Anita Plesiu, Prezi’s director of global customer support. Like her coworker Kovacs, she was recently promoted for her outstanding work in 2020. “We tried to make sure that not only through our support but also through our products, we are supporting people who need to stay connected.”

Using actionable insights to support people

Before the pandemic, as Prezi grew and added more employees to its maturing support organization, the team needed to take a closer look at its performance. To do that, the team turned to Zendesk Explore to provide performance data.

“Explore also helps us to mature the whole support organization. Once we realized we needed something like Zendesk Explore, we’re just at the tip of the iceberg,” Kovacs said. “We’re getting so much data from Explore, which helps us improve the whole team and our processes. And as the person who had to set this up—I’m the Zendesk expert—I really like working with it.”

Beyond the ease of use, data pulled from Explore helps the team direct its resources where they are most needed, whether that’s to support a new product such as Video or to help tech-averse teachers who struggle with adopting new technology. It’s not unusual for Prezi agents, especially during the pandemic, to spend considerable amounts of time helping customers gain a full understanding of how the company’s products work—for example, Plesiu points to an agent who spent 15 minutes explaining the concept of copying and pasting to a teacher.

In a year with a host of challenges—not to mention a product launch—Prezi relied on Zendesk to bridge the gap many users experienced with remote learning and work. With the help of Zendesk’s automation and AI, omnichannel experience for agents and end-users, and its integration with other tools, Prezi maximized responsiveness when users needed it most.

“I’m very proud to see our accomplishments this year in spite of all the difficulties that we had to face,” Plesiu said. “The biggest testament of how strong this team is can be seen in the numbers. When times were the hardest, that’s when the team did their best.”