Hotjar doubles self-service score and cuts ticket volume using Zendesk

Hotjar helps its clients better understand how users behave on more than 900,000 websites. The company prides itself on providing an intuitive, self-service tool for high-growth businesses—companies for whom adaptability, nimbleness, and data driven insights are everything. This ethos sets the tone for Hotjar’s customer service mantra: No customer should ever have to log a ticket.

Empowering customers with a robust self-service experience is a top priority for Hotjar. But the company’s self-service strategy was held back by the limits of a previous customer support solution; a lack of data clarity and an inability to set complex workflows. While Hotjar was providing clients with expert analysis and rich data, it was unable to apply the same level of insight and optimization to its own customer experience.

With 53 percent YoY growth, the Hotjar team needed a solution that could match its pioneering self-service strategy and enable the support team to work smarter, not harder. Zendesk provided exactly what Hotjar was looking for.

A powerful help center drives Hotjar’s self-service CX strategy

Every aspect of Hotjar’s customer support program is infused with a self-service philosophy. “If a client has to reach out to a human being at Hotjar, we see that as a symptom of a problem—a lack of clarity within the product or documentation that was preventable. So when we analyze support tickets it’s always through the lens of ‘how could we have made this easier for people so that they don’t need to reach out to us?’,” explained Coleen Bachi, director of customer success and support.

Because of this approach, Hotjar has one of the smartest, most advanced uses of Zendesk Guide in operation. By applying its own behavioral insight tools and expertise to the help center, the team is able to pinpoint the exact moment and circumstances in which a customer decides they need to submit a ticket. “It’s that level of insight that allows us to say, had we just incorporated a little bit more detail into this article, or had we provided an accompanying screenshot, we would have been able to deflect this user and probably others,” Bachi explained.

Hotjar leverages all of its user experience insights to continuously optimize and refine the help center, making it one of the most powerful tools in the overall customer experience. While the number of visitors to its help center pages has increased by 100 percent, the number of support tickets submitted has dropped by 50 percent. Hotjar has doubled its self-service score to 40, meaning that for every 45 people landing on the help center, only one submits a ticket.

Smart investment in a CX strategy benefits the whole business

“Having Zendesk has allowed us to keep scaling to accommodate incredible growth."Coleen Bachi, Director of Customer Success & Support at Hotjar“Hotjar views customer support as the backbone of our company. Not only do we help customers get more value out of our product, but we also convert those experiences into valuable insights to help us deliver better outcomes,” Bachi explained. With robust data analytics and insights gathered through Zendesk Explore, Hotjar is able to get real value out of every customer interaction. “It’s not a one and done transaction that we forget about, but a cycle of feedback to the product team or the sales team, so that they can deliver better outcomes for our customers.”

For example, the team found that customer satisfaction wasn’t affected by a difference in response time. With this insight, they were able to confidently focus resources in other areas to improve self-service. “We prioritize the customer experience first and see tickets as a way for us to improve that customer experience,” Bachi explained.

Integrations with Zendesk operate company-wide

The Hotjar team loves to experiment with the different apps and integrations available through Zendesk. Business critical integrations including Asana, Salesforce, Jira, Slack, Hotjar, Quickie Plus, as well as time tracking and productivity tools are embedded across the company. “The sales team manages inbound sales requests through Zendesk and Salesforce, we have a legal and security team that also runs its entire customer workflow through Zendesk. Our product team also dips into Zendesk through Jira, for example if there’s a bug and they want to get more context.”

“We also use an internal knowledge system called guru. We rely on this integration within Zendesk to educate ourselves about various topics as we answer customer inquiries. And our quality assurance tool, Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus), allows us to track overall quality.”

The extensibility of Zendesk means that information and insights flow easily to the teams that need it for a deeper and more connected overview of customer needs and business impact.

Hotjar empowers agents to lead improvements with great results

As a thought leader at the forefront of the technology industry, Hotjar attracts talented, technically-minded people and empowers them to experiment and explore new ideas and innovations. “Through working with customers, our agents have a unique set of knowledge and skills to recommend new ways to drive efficiency and customer satisfaction. We want to tap into those skills to improve the customer experience team beyond one-off interactions. And we give them the freedom to do it.”

Bachi described one particular example of this staff-led approach in action. “A small group of support employees tasked themselves with enhancing the help center each and every day for six months using Zendesk Guide, Google Analytics, and Hotjar’s own internal tools. The resulting improvement in self-service scores prevented the need to hire more support agents, saving the company a considerable amount of money.”

For Hotjar’s support team, Zendesk is a playground in which they can experiment and customize workflows and integrations to support the needs of different teams. “Zendesk creates an environment where that is possible, where you can test things out. So it aligns really closely with the values that we have as a company,” Bachi explained.

Having experienced high levels of success in deflecting tickets through the self service model, Hotjar plans to implement Zendesk Chat in 2022, to drive even faster value and the better insights that real-time interactions can offer at scale.