WATCHA + Zendesk: Personalized streaming experiences with seamless customer care

Since 2011, WATCHA PEDIA has been catering to people’s diverse entertainment preferences. Today, it is South Korea’s favorite movie and TV show recommendations app. With a rich data portfolio, WATCHA PEDIA launched the video streaming service WATCHA in 2016. The platform’s recommendation accuracy outperforms other video streaming services. As a result, its super-personalized service has gained thousands of subscribers in South Korea and Japan.

As WATCHA’s customer base kept growing, agent teams increasingly struggled to address user inquiries efficiently. The company’s web of communication channels, which included the WATCHA app, email, SMS, and hotline, became increasingly complex to manage. Tracking resolution progress and connecting user communication histories across multiple systems was difficult. As a result, customers were often waiting up to three days to get their queries solved. Agents also faced challenges when generating customer insights manually via spreadsheets.

The lockdowns worldwide aggravated the strain on WATCHA’s customer service agents. The company saw a flux of new subscribers and a two-fold increase in customer inquiries. This compelled WATCHA to seek a new customer service solution.

Unifying communication channels and data for seamless customer service

WATCHA needed a platform that gives its support teams a unified view of all customer inquiries. Since its brand is founded on understanding what customers want, WATCHA also required a solution to meet its customers’ communication preferences. It chose Zendesk for its comprehensive solution. “We needed a platform that would help us efficiently support customers from the moment they needed assistance until their query was resolved. In addition, we wanted to analyze data by automatically linking inquiries in real-time. Zendesk makes all of this possible,” shared Chorok Kim, customer service team manager at WATCHA.

Working with Zendesk, WATCHA was able to personalize its FAQs for prospective, new, and existing customers and migrate its FAQ management system to Zendesk’s help center software. This enabled customers to resolve simpler issues quickly and without agent involvement. In addition, WATCHA automatically forwarded customer emails to Zendesk’s integrated ticketing system known, where algorithm-based decisions supplemented agent activities. “Using over 900 macros on Zendesk’s platform, we’re able to set the ticket status, triggers, and automation based on the progress of the resolution, enabling our teams to resolve straightforward queries more efficiently. The new tools have enabled us to cut our first response time by over 60 percent over the course of eight months,” said Kim.

Agents have stopped using spreadsheets and now use Zendesk’s reporting and analytics software for cross-channel data management. “Previously, a lot of time and resources were spent manually linking inquiry and resolution data on spreadsheets. It was cumbersome and problematic to extract any value. With Zendesk, we now can accurately identify what needs to be improved at the company level and set goals to increase efficiency. Meanwhile, as the system processes and analyzes tickets automatically, our teams can focus on more critical tasks,” shared Kim.

With a more distributed team working from home, WATCHA is also able to enhance teamwork. Using Zendesk’s integrations with Slack and Jira, its agents can now collaborate and deliver solutions quicker. Kim explained, “It’s much easier for teams to track issues simultaneously because Zendesk captures each customer’s information in a single thread. Agents can easily bring in relevant people from other teams to solve a problem together. It saves us a lot of time. Agents would have otherwise had to manually extract and summarize the information from the ticket and relay it to relevant teams – which made seamless handovers challenging.”

Primed for global expansion

The new customer service tools and real-time insights significantly reduced the number of WATCHA’s missed responses and delayed resolutions. While the agents’ first response time is more than 50 percent faster, Zendesk has also helped teams deliver complete resolutions more efficiently. Customers are now getting their queries solved in less than 24 hours as of October 2021—a significant improvement compared to the average resolution time of 70 hours before. WATCHA now addresses operational inefficiencies swiftly to deliver a seamless customer experience. According to Kim, “People will remember the good service and associate it with WATCHA.”

The streamlined communication and collaborative practices additionally help WATCHA’s customer agents work remotely. Kim shared, “Agents were able to transition seamlessly to working from home while providing consistent support to customers. Teams used various integrations, such as the Zendesk Internal Note feature, to efficiently collaborate with colleagues and resolve issues. One of the most important things when working remotely is smooth communication between team members virtually. We were able to achieve this through Zendesk and its integration with various tools.”

Equipped to serve more customers, WATCHA is planning to leverage Zendesk to further personalize its customer service through multilingual support and integrating with messaging apps that are popular in each target market. “Last year, we launched in Japan, and Zendesk’s multilingual functions and dynamic content-enabled our teams in South Korea and Japan to provide good service to our existing and new customers. This helps us build a clear path forward and scale our operations,” concluded Kim.