Eight Eleven Group supports internal teams with Zendesk and AssetSonar

Founded in 2002, Eight Eleven Group provides solutions and business professionals to companies in the IT and healthcare industries. “Relationships are at the center of everything we do,” says Jake Baldwin, IT operations manager at Eight Eleven. The company comprises three divisions: Brooksource, Medasource, and Calculated Hire. “Across all divisions, our business is people. As a parent company, Eight Eleven provides the vision and foundation for our brand’s focus and prosperity. Each division has been built with our customers’ evolving needs in mind.”

A professional services and consulting organization serving more than 30 markets across the United States, Eight Eleven is continually looking for ways to better its communications. Meeting the needs of its over 900 employees has always been a top priority and posed some major challenges for the firm in its early days.

Before Zendesk, Eight Eleven used a shared Exchange inbox, which consisted of emails or text messages from a manager’s BlackBerry Messenger. “This totally limited our capabilities and oftentimes resulted in some tickets getting lost in the confusion,” shares Baldwin. “To mitigate these issues, we chose Zendesk in 2012 because it was considered the best platform available to meet the needs of our employees. Thanks to the great support and adaptability of the software, we have been able to seamlessly evolve our use of it as we grow.”

Saving Time with Automation

Eight Eleven Group uses Zendesk primarily to support internal employees within the marketing and IT teams. From dealing with service requests for assets to tracking marketing projects, Zendesk has been a vital tool for managing the work and communication within these teams. “I especially like the automation feature of the system for my own team as we can create prepared responses or action through macros to quickly resolve simpler requests,” says Baldwin. “This ultimately frees me up to focus on more complex operations and even future planning.”

Zendesk’s automation also works like a project manager as it automatically follows up on the end users’ responses through a process called Bump, Bump, Solve. These automated triggers help agents to remind customers with a “bump” that they have not responded to a pending ticket. “With these automations, we have freed up bandwidth, and improved our response time,” explains Baldwin. “We can’t thank our Zendesk representative enough for recommending this type of automation. It has been a huge help in prioritizing submitted tickets and ensuring that pending issues are resolved in a timely manner.”

Customization enhances efficiency, communications, and management

Eight Eleven and Zendesk have grown together over the years. This symbiotic relationship and its solutions have evolved from merely tracking and responding to employee tickets. It has increased efficiency, improved communications, as well as the management of ongoing projects through customization. “The personalization capabilities are one of our favorite Zendesk features,” says Baldwin. “We have taken full advantage of this by creating macros, triggers, automations, SCIM through Azure AD, custom reports, and multiple brand support portals with custom websites. Through customization, our employees now have the tools at their disposal to better help themselves, which is a huge time saver.”

This also includes the creation of help articles with tags which have been added to Eight Elevens’ Help Center. Employees can easily look up relevant information to solve their problems before submitting a ticket. This greatly cuts down the number of simple requests that have to be managed.

Integrating with AssetSonar leads for increased productivity

AssetSonar, powered by EZOfficeInventory, seamlessly integrates with Zendesk, providing a robust asset management solution by tracking, organizing, and monitoring all IT assets. This allows Eight Eleven to save invaluable time when responding to internal tickets from employees. “It has been super helpful,” says Nick Tavassoli, help desk analyst at Eight Eleven. “With Zendesk and AssetSonar, I now have the ability to simply and quickly track all of our assets. I know who submitted a ticket, the type of computer they are using, and the issues they are having. It allows me to troubleshoot much faster and resolve the matter in a timely fashion. All the information I need is at my fingertips.”

By saving time resolving tickets, Tavassoli and his team can now focus more on improving the company’s systems. He says, “The combined value has been exponential and is a win-win for everyone involved.”

A bright future with Zendesk

Zendesk has been the perfect match for Eight Eleven as the latter continues to grow and look to the future. In just a few short years, Eight Eleven has gone from using Zendesk exclusively in its IT and Marketing departments to planning on adding all of its corporate support teams to the ecosystem in 2023. “We have benefited so much from the service that we are expanding the use of Zendesk to provide support within all of our corporate functions, which include human resources, accounting, finance, IT, legal, and payroll,” says Baldwin. There are also plans to formally introduce Zendesk to its 10,000 consultants around the country.

Eight Eleven’s journey with Zendesk is far from ending. “Compared to our other partners, we’ve been with Zendesk the longest. I don’t think we have ever thought for a second to look around and see if the grass is greener on the other side,” says Baldwin. “Zendesk continues to invest in the tools and features that we need and use at this point. As we continue to grow, our plan is for them to be by our side providing the necessary tools for us to scale into the future.”