Dailymotion builds customer relationships and brand loyalty with Zendesk

When the Dailymotion customer support team noticed a user on Facebook asking for a new feature, they sprung into action, generating a ticket. A few months later, Dailymotion released the feature and the support team contacted the user directly to share the news. The outcome was a very happy user.

He wasn’t the only one. Giovanni Berthelot, Head of Customer Support at Dailymotion, explained: “With Zendesk, we were able to see all the people asking for the same feature and could get back to them when it was released.”

For a company aiming to offer the best experience for video makers and viewers in a competitive environment, the extra effort to provide proactive support matters.

“Customer experience has a huge impact on our users,” Giovanni, who started at Dailymotion five years ago, said. “Once partners are on-boarded by the content team, the support team is available to help answer any product questions or technical difficulties. We have received positive feedback from companies who appreciate that kind of personalized support.”

Founded in Paris in 2005, Dailymotion’s catalog of 150 million videos attracts 300 million unique visitors and three billion video views each month. The company started as a user-generated content platform but refocused its business model after being acquired in 2015 by the French media conglomerate Vivendi. Dailymotion now emphasizes premium, curated content.

After seeing that an email inbox wasn’t a long-term ticketing solution, Dailymotion adopted Zendesk Support in 2010 and added Zendesk Guide shortly after. It also started building a team that went beyond simply responding to tickets; Giovanni’s team educates users, encourages innovative product use, and provides expertise to its content-creation partners.

Its support team is comprised of Level 1 and Level 2 agents. Level 1 agents handle routine product questions; Level 2 agents answer tickets about premium features and more complex technical issues. Team members across levels often collaborate so they can resolve issues more effectively.

The team has grown from two Level 2 agents in Paris to five agents globally, including two agents in New York and one agent in Singapore. The team’s expansion was justified by Zendesk data that showed a rise in overnight tickets from premium partners in Asia and America. Giovanni also oversees an external team of 10 Level 1 agents. Together, they offer 24/7 support in French and English.

“We work hand-in-hand with the outsourced team. We have a product training session every week and a monthly meeting with Level 1 managers to go over outstanding tickets responses and or process updates,” Giovanni explained.

His team also works with Dailymotion’s product team internally to make sure they are aware of any product updates. This helps them prepare help center articles, macros, and training for both Level 1 and Level 2 agents before product changes are rolled out.

Creating separate channels in Zendesk for users and premium partners helps Dailymotion organize its internal resources. “We’ve created several custom tools using the Zendesk API, including one that allows us to automatically detect if the request is coming from a user or a partner. Depending on the nature of a request, it may go directly to a Level 2 agent.”

Other customizations to its Zendesk instance—a dynamic CRM app to more easily troubleshoot tickets, a quick-link section in their feedback forms that pushes data to the user based on the form selected, and a “Breaking News” widget on the help center that communicates when an important feature is temporarily broken—are all designed to strengthen the customer experience.

When the company transitioned to premium video content in 2017, Giovanni and his team made improvements to its help center, which receives 142,000 visits each month. They continue to work on curating support articles and sharing them proactively. For example, using the Zendesk AI agent, customers are able to find what they need without interacting with an agent. This has boosted users’ self-sufficiency and the support team’s efficiency: In just one year, the Zendesk AI agent was able to solve 2,798 tickets, a 14 percent overall resolution rate.

“We have time to focus on advanced issues. Instead of using macros or sharing help center articles with our users, the team can handle more complex tickets. Our backlog is decreasing, and our technical knowledge is increasing,” said Giovanni.

His team committed to their first SLA for premium support in 2018: a first-reply-time of 90 minutes. A custom Slack bot has helped them improve over time by notifying agents when a ticket comes in and when the clock is running out on a response.

“Thanks to the SLA, we have been able to identify which kinds of tickets are breached and how to fix this in our tools or processes. In early 2018, we were successful at meeting our SLA about 68 percent of the time, and our first reply time was around 80 minutes. Now we meet the SLA 96 percent of the time, within around 40 minutes,” said Giovanni. “We are able to reach more cases, faster. If a bug is fixed before the end of the day, we can let our partners and users know.”

Giovanni views his lean, high-functioning support team as the voice of the users and he shares what they hear back with others at Dailymotion. He’s looking forward to digging even deeper into the customer experience once they roll out Zendesk Explore and have instant analytics and reporting capabilities.

The company continues to choose Zendesk because of the products’ flexibility and the relationship Giovanni has with the team at Zendesk.

“I am used to contacting Zendesk’s support team and our main contact at Zendesk. He also proactively contacts me when an interesting feature might be available for us. It’s very good to have someone who understands your use case and can provide guidance when changes happen.”