Equisoft + Zendesk: Digital transformation pioneer reimagines client support

Leaders in the life insurance and wealth management industries have been established for decades, a testament to their personal touch and deep industry experience. And while these industries have been slow to adopt digital transformation, they’ve now embraced modern solutions to complement their client experiences.

For the past 25 years, Equisoft has been well ahead of the digital transformation trend. As a global provider of advanced digital solutions in life insurance and wealth management, Equisoft works to optimize processes, increase revenue, and promote growth for its clients. The company’s global team has grown to nearly 400 employees, with offices spanning the US, Canada, the Caribbean, Chile, South Africa, and India.

“Over the years, we see our clients faced with growing customer expectations for instant and digital-first resolutions, and we’re no exception,” said Christine Bérubé, Equisoft’s director of customer success. “As they turn to Equisoft to modernize their front and back-end systems, we’ve also invested in modernizing our own Support solution to provide best-in-class client experiences.”

Mending a disjointed help desk

Equisoft prides itself on being a results-oriented company. So the team looked into the pitfalls of its wiki-style help desk, noting the hours wasted searching across disjointed portals.

Without a centralized help desk, the support team was unable to search for keywords across various instances. Not only was content difficult to find, it also became increasingly challenging to create helpful resources for a global customer base across multiple product lines. The team also wanted to provide contextual support to clients when they needed it, without disrupting the customer experience in the app.

“At the time, we were seeing that our other solutions integrated with one another, so we asked why the same shouldn’t apply to our support tools,” said Marie-Eve Marcil, Equisoft’s coordinator of customer success. “To ensure the seamless flow of information from agents to customers, we turned to Zendesk.”

As a Zendesk customer since 2010, Equisoft had a long history of using Zendesk Support for its B2C business. By 2017, leadership began to reevaluate the self-service experience and looked to Zendesk to help build a more robust help desk solution. Equisoft decided to look for a solution that could create value not only for its internal support teams but also for its customers.

Intuitive help in a single location

Today, all help desk articles are searchable and live in a single portal thanks to Zendesk Guide. Agents and clients can now easily reference Equisoft’s help desk to provide faster support and avoid redundant work. And when a client asks a question, whether in English or in French, the Zendesk AI agent uses AI to quickly surface available and relevant articles.

“Zendesk’s AI tools are as intuitive as they get for our clients and for our agents,” said Bérubé. “Why would anyone build new AI help center software when they can just use Zendesk’s out-of-the-box integration?”

With the implementation of the help center and the Zendesk AI agent, agents are now noticing that clients have become increasingly self-sufficient. Clients use the help center not only to search for answers but to easily access previous tickets for quick reference.

Meanwhile, with less repetitive tickets to answer, agents are able to spend their energy on more technical inquiries and complex requests.

Centralized communication and collaboration

With offices spanning the globe, Equisoft has found that it is much easier to communicate across teams with Zendesk.

Teams are able to solve problems collectively, taking notes and asking questions directly within the platform with Zendesk’s Side Conversations add-on. “Side Conversations is a beautiful tool,” Bérubé said. “It helps our agents get outside help without pulling others onto the main ticket directly, and it only loops in the right people.”

Since all tickets are funneled to a single platform, a large group of agents can be notified of important requests quickly. That increased visibility has positively impacted agent response time and customer satisfaction.

Agents also have easy access to all past tickets, saving them hours of looking through thousands of emails for contextual information when troubleshooting. Given the technical nature of many tickets, agents no longer face the stress and frustration of understanding historical context that may predate their time at Equisoft.

Alain Racine, a customer support team coordinator at Equisoft, can attest to how powerful that context can be. “I cannot imagine how to do support without Zendesk, especially after seeing how others have to dig through emails to find more information,” Racine said.

Insight into relationship management

With three major product lines, Equisoft organizes its Zendesk instance into three distinct product views. Customer support is then able to report back on the number of tickets received for a certain product-specific issue or alert engineering if a particular client reports a problem.

“While we had many ideas of articles we wanted to write and videos we wanted to produce, we wanted to prioritize our time,” said Marcil. “Rather than assuming what our customers needed, we turned to Zendesk Explore and used metrics to see which videos and articles were most popular or were confusing. With real-time data and real-user feedback, we were able to determine what content to produce more and less of and better prioritize our time.”

Additionally, Equisoft configured Zendesk’s intuitive API to integrate with its library of video tutorials. Agents are then able to report on video metrics such as views and video completion, using the data to pinpoint where clients are experiencing confusion or finding product gaps. These key insights improve the client onboarding process and inform future video creation.

By using Zendesk, the support team is empowered with qualitative and quantitative information. Now, agents can quickly identify where clients are experiencing pain points and use real-time data to relay that information back to the product and engineering team.

The support organization has become a critical component in addressing product decisions and helps Equisoft provide clients with exactly what they need, when they need it.

Scaling during COVID-19

As Equisoft’s global reach has grown, so has its support team. Equisoft started with a single support agent and has now grown to a team of 48 agents.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional onboarding, Equisoft has been able to seamlessly train new support hires virtually. Zendesk’s centralized platform keeps all documentation in a single place for new employees to view and reference, allowing new hires to be set up for success from day one.

“It’s incredibly easy to get new team members working within the Zendesk platform. Teaching new hires how to navigate Zendesk takes no more than a couple days of training,” Bérubé said. “Our newest recruit is already sharing ideas and recommending new ways to use Zendesk.”