Reward Gateway taps Zendesk to scale growth with faster service

Attracting and keeping top talent is no small feat in a competitive job market. To stand out as a great organization, employers need to help people get connected, stay informed, and feel empowered in the workplace.

Since 2006, Reward Gateway has been providing HR teams the tools and products to engage employees and drive company success. Reward Gateway’s powerful Employee Engagement Platform provides recognition, rewards, surveys, benefits, and additional capabilities that companies need to support talent acquisition and retention.

Now the leading employee engagement platform provider in the U.S., Reward Gateway has more than 650 employees in six global offices. The company continues to expand the global reach of its world-class tools, which are used by more than 8 million employees and 4,000 client companies.

Scaling support to enable growth

Reward Gateway’s Head of Support, Dimitar Kondakov, oversees 120 people who are focused on delivering top-notch service. That includes the client support team that works with HR departments and the employee support team that serves individual workers using Reward Gateway.

“Our teams make sure that all the end users who interact with our platform have the smoothest experience possible. This ensures that we achieve our mission to make the world a better place to work,” says Kondakov.

His CX teams represent the voice of the business. Improving workflows for support agents allows them to create positive experiences and cultivate stronger relationships with clients and employees. Reward Gateway saw an opportunity for improvement and decided to move its support teams to Zendesk Suite.

Rolling out Zendesk enabled the team to set up the right automations, reporting, and channel integrations, which paved the way for cost-efficient growth and higher employee satisfaction. Since switching to Zendesk, the company’s user base has tripled in size and the support team has grown by only 20 percent.

“Zendesk has been a very reliable partner because the triggers, automations, add-ons, and every other process we’ve built allows the team to be scalable and have meaningful support interactions with as many end users as possible,” adds Kondakov, who helped with the implementation.

One solution unifies data and teams

Prior to the migration, the support team was using several different providers for CRM, phone calls, and live chat.

“We had different systems for ticket communication, chat, and phone, so we couldn’t see one single source of truth across all interactions,” Kondakov recalls. “We needed to unify our support teams around the same system and the same reporting, and we were able to consolidate all three channels in Zendesk, which is amazing from a support perspective.”

Since deploying omnichannel support, Reward Gateway has seen a 110 percent reduction in call wait time and a 145 percent reduction in chat wait time.

Stronger data for smarter decisions

Client support encountered major inefficiencies and obstacles using their previous provider because it was configured to serve mainly the sales and client success team.

“Previously, we had very little control over what confirmation emails clients received from support and very limited access to reporting,” notes Kondakov. “We had a difficult time forecasting how much headcount we needed for busy periods, because we could only see the total number of contacts and we weren’t getting accurate results.”

Zendesk now seamlessly integrates with Salesforce, JIRA, and other internal systems, making it easier to feed valuable CX data across the company. That’s important for connecting the support organization with the sales and success teams, all of which use Salesforce. Reliable analytics also help drive product enhancements.

“We provide different kinds of reporting, not only to our clients, but also internally. Our developers are building certain features and products based on feedback from users and clients, so Zendesk queries and dashboards are absolutely critical to our functioning,” explains Kondakov.

Time-saving macros

The days of managing macros and email templates manually are long gone. Reward Gateway agents appreciate having Zendesk automation at their fingertips, because they are often handling up to three chats at once and need to find information quickly.

“In Zendesk, we receive suggestions on what is the best macro or shortcut to use. And with the AI suggestions, that saves a lot of time, not only for agents to serve clients, but also for agent training,” says Kondakov.

Agents now enjoy a seamless experience in Zendesk rather than switching between tools, and it saves approximately 40 hours in agent training.

No-code workflows and bespoke automations

In Kondakov’s experience, “the Zendesk collaboration add-on is something that my team can’t live without. It allows us to contact third-party providers directly from the ticket. And the visibility is brilliant, because on the same page we can see what was said by the customer, the provider, and our team.”

Reward Gateway saves 29 hours monthly on managing and maintaining different inboxes now that they use Zendesk to communicate with third-party providers.

Previously, support teams couldn’t send automated emails to clients or easily obtain the information needed to resolve certain issues. In Zendesk, a ticket marked status pending will automatically trigger a followup email a few days later. If agents need to escalate a client’s request, Zendesk automation reopens the tickets on hold, prompting the agent to chase third-party providers for an update and to notify the client.

Reward Gateway now has more control over its support workflows, instead of relying on a consultant or administrator and accruing extra licensing and implementation costs.

“Having the flexibility to make bespoke triggers and automations without having to know code and without having to be a developer is amazing,” Kondakov says. “I’ve seen similar interfaces in other systems, but they’re not so advanced and they don’t allow such bespoke customization.”

Real-time agility for a better agent experience

Setting up the right workflows means that support teams can continue to adapt in real-time, which is crucial for the end customer experience and the agent experience.

If a client issue arises, the team can communicate to impacted users all at once using the bulk reply functionality in Zendesk, instead of manually tagging tickets or waiting for IT support. Having that workflow saves hundreds, if not dozens, of calls to the help desk team and prevents thousands of additional contacts.

Zendesk’s omnichannel Agent Workspace enables Reward Gateway to deliver the best agent experience–from day one. “When a new hire starts, one of the first things they learn to do is work with Zendesk,” says Kondakov. “Zendesk has been very good for our employee experience. We almost never receive negative feedback about internal processes.”

Deep community of best practices

“We have already built our whole support team and culture around the best practices for Zendesk. So, moving to a different system would be a significant change that would have an impact on the service levels that we set,” says Kondakov. And, he continues to reap the benefits of being connected to such a large group of professionals that are using Zendesk.

“Joining Zendesk gave us access to massive amounts of information, such as the help articles and public forums where we can find different tips and tricks. It gave us a lot of opportunities to fix or improve things, and then show the team and the business that we can make life at work easier.”