Lightspeed sees cost savings and new efficiencies with Zendesk

Most independent businesses can use a hand when it comes to managing their retail shop or restaurant, and Lightspeed is on hand to help. Lightspeed provides a cloud-based point-of-sale system and e-commerce platform that allows retailers to seamlessly manage their store, handling everything from daily sales to inventory management to employee performance to advanced reporting. With Lightspeed working behind-the-scenes, retailers can spend more time with customers, and doing what they love.

When Lightspeed was founded in 2005, CEO Dax Dasilva was determined to give independent retailers the ability to be in control of their store. Dasilva designed a point-of-sale (POS) solution that was beautiful, felt familiar, and was easy to use. Over the years, that POS solution evolved into an omnichannel product, unveiled in 2016, that gives retailers a single view into their business, accessible from any device, and that allows them to interact with new and existing customers whether they’re shopping in-store or online.

Today, Lightspeed’s all-in-one-solution accommodates mobile payments, omnichannel sales, inventory management, robust analytics, and more. But the product isn’t the only thing that’s evolved. Lightspeed has grown from its original four employees to more than 600, and serves more than 45,000 customers in 101 countries. What’s more, the company reports that the average customer sees a 20 percent increase in revenue after one year of using its solution.

Behind Lightspeed’s software is great service. A customer-centric ethos lies at the core of Lightspeed’s business, manifesting in empathetic product design and outstanding support.

“We want to give our customers as much time and attention as they need to get their questions resolved,” explained VP of Customer Support Denise Nahas. “Like everyone, we want the customer to be self-reliant, but if they are calling support, we want that experience to show we’re here for them. We’ll help get them back to their day-to-day work.”

This is why Lightspeed looks for like-minded partners when it comes to selecting the tools they use in-house. They need to find efficiencies wherever possible so that agents’ time is spent with the customers who need the most support.

In the early days at Lightspeed, when the team numbered 12 people, handling about 100 tickets per day, Denise began looking for a ticketing tool that would meet their requirements for providing great customer service. Zendesk Support came recommended to her, and she recalls it was, “an easy sale. The way it was designed, the way it worked, was just what we needed at the time.”

The team adopted and quickly began using Support to answer emails and build a customer forum. “I remember the transition because I didn’t have a full-time employee to work on the implementation,” Denise recalled. “A support specialist was able to set up the tool and work with IT during his free time.”

A year later, the team was growing quickly and Lightspeed made the decision to simplify and consolidate down to a single tool. They were heavy Salesforce users and so began using a customized version of the Cases feature to manage customer contacts. Yet, as it happens with any rapidly scaling company, business needs continued to change and by December of 2015, Denise decided to return to Zendesk Support. This time around, she wanted to take advantage of some newer functionality like the help center, a feature of Zendesk Guide, and to bolster their multilingual support in English, French, German, and Dutch.

Lightspeed’s story is one of incredible growth. By 2017, the support team has grown to approximately 173 agents handling an average of 1,000 tickets per day. Many of the agents had used Zendesk Support at other jobs, and so the transition back was smooth. From an operations standpoint, Support Operations Manager Dan Ross appreciates the time the tool saves for the team. He’s set up workflows using more than 160 triggers and, with automatic routing in place, agents can respond in the customer’s preferred language. The teams also utilize macros for easily-answered and often-asked questions.

“Zendesk saved us time on every transaction,” Dan said. “We quickly realized that any time we could save on the support process helps us to better help our customers. When you multiply the seconds we save on each ticket by the number of tickets we receive each day, we’ve seen a significant increase in efficiency.”

Dan and his team built a custom integration with Salesforce so that the support and sales teams could continue to have the oversight and access to their Salesforce data that they needed. As a result, agents can view all pertinent account information about a customer from within an iframe in Zendesk, including which products customers are subscribed to and when their subscription ends. On the sales side, the integration also shows sales reps how many times a given account has reached out to support and allows reps to create new tickets right from a customer’s account page.

“Being able to have a two-way integration lets everyone work more effectively,” Dan said. Sales reps and customer success managers are encouraged to log in to Zendesk Support as “light agents,” a feature of Support that allows people on other teams to have limited permissions, but access to view, follow, and privately comment on tickets. This allows sales and success the ability to collaborate on tickets, and to read up on incident details, or check on a customer’s most recent Net Promoter Score℠, ahead of a call.

When it came to Lightspeed’s self-service offering, the team’s goal was to provide as much guidance as possible. Using Zendesk Guide, the team built a robust Support Center, which includes a help center for each product. The team is also in the process of deploying Zendesk Chat on their help center pages as another channel of support, and as a means of ticket deflection. To that end, and to help control volume, they plan to use the Web Widget to surface relevant help articles before a chat is initiated with an agent.

On the back end, the team reports on how many customers submit a ticket after viewing an article, which helps to gauge the effectiveness of the support center’s content and allows the team to make strategic edits. The team also closely watches, and looks to decrease, the percentage of overall tickets from new customers.

By tracking tickets submitted by customers within the first three to six months of using Lightspeed products against the customer’s support center views, the team can determine whether the support center is effectively meeting customers’ needs. It also helps to identify the stumbling blocks that new customers most frequently experience so that Lightspeed can make adjustments at the product and onboarding level. This effort has paid off; the team has found that the number of tickets submitted by new customers is trending down.

Thanks to the Salesforce integration, this type of reporting by customer segment has also helped the team take other proactive steps. Similarly, Dan integrated Support and their internal bug tracking system so that the team can easily tag tickets and follow up with affected customers en masse. “We can report back to customers when a feature they wanted is available, or when an issue has been fixed,” Dan said. “We no longer have to go through a history of cases manually and single out the relevant ones, which has been another significant time saver.”

Denise encourages agents to speak their mind and to offer suggestions to improve their workflows. “Supporting customers is a difficult job,” she said. “It’s our responsibility to not create more hindrances and to keep tools in the background so people can do their best work.”

Dan can implement most changes within a few days’ time, and having the agility to quickly change processes and workflows has inspired the team to take a more active role in improving operations. Dan added, “People feel more invested because they see that changes they suggested are making their teammates’ lives easier.”

Net Promoter and NPS are registered U.S. trademarks, and Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.