Case Study: Widgetbox & Zendesk

Widgetbox Adds Community to CRM with a Simple Get Satisfaction – Zendesk Integration

Widgetbox is the world’s best place to find and make widgets. Every day, millions of people visit this leading self-service Web widget platform to create widgets—mini, portable applications that reach new users across the Internet with dynamic content.

With 1.5 million users, a superior, cost-effective and fully scalable customer service and support solution is central to the Widgetbox CRM strategy. With that in mind, Widgetbox went about instituting a few tactics that not only gave them the superior CRM solution they sought, but lowered their support costs by half. Here are the simple best practices they followed:

1. Build Customer Community

Widgetbox realized their social media-savvy customer base was already creating a wealth of community knowledge around their offering that, if tapped, could provide a channel for instantaneous community feedback and better and faster customer service. Using Get Satisfaction, Widgetbox built community, brought it into the support mix, and empowered their customers to find the answers they needed through community first.

Not only are millions of Widgetbox customers now getting the satisfaction they need through community, but Widgetbox’s support expenditures have been dramatically reduced.

2. Make User Experience a Top Priority

Widgetbox knew that for all the advantage of community-based support, there are still times when an individual issue must be tracked and resolved. They needed a traditional help-desk solution for the management and resolution of trouble tickets.

The customer-savvy folks at Widgetbox knew that from the customer’s point of view, issue resolution should be seamless and easy—that service and support should go hand in hand. When they found a great on-demand help-desk solution in ZenDesk, they were happy to discover that an integrated solution was available for both Get Satisfaction and ZenDesk, giving them the seamless service and support they knew their customers expected.

Today, Widgetbox customers flow easily in and out of both their Get Satisfaction support community and their ZenDesk help desk. From the Widgetbox Web site, Get Satisfaction links and widgets put community first in the support chain, allowing users to help each other when they can, answering common questions and resolving issues on their own. Once in the Get Satisfaction community, if an issue requires individual, dedicated support, a ZenDesk trouble ticket is a click away.

Through the integration, the two SaaS platforms easily share customer and community data through an open API. Community issues can become trouble tickets, trouble ticket resolution can be readily shared with the community, all within one interface, one seamless customer service and support solution.

The integration even offers single sign-on, allowing customers to sign on only once to access and move between both platforms—an enormous advantage for Dave Rhea, Quality Assurance and Customer Support Manager at ZenDesk. “We didn’t want our users to see that they were using two different support systems,” he says. “Single sign-on is huge for us. The need to create and manage separate log-ins on separate sites often impedes customers from completing their interaction with us. We want as many people interacting with us about their issues as possible.”

3. Build a Customer-Centric Business

Widgetbox—who takes customer-centricity quite seriously—helped to foster a customer-driven business culture by putting awareness of the customer into all levels of the business and getting everyone involved in the Get Satisfaction community. New community topics are shared throughout the company via e-mail, and all departments—from engineering to service—are encouraged to pay attention and get involved.

The Widgetbox Get Satisfaction - ZenDesk integration is a superb example of what a great mix of affordable SaaS solutions can do for a growing business. It’s helped them tap the power of community and leverage smart help-desk technology in a way that’s entirely seamless to their users—right in line with their commitment to customer-centricity.

About ZenDesk

ZenDesk is inspiring the help-desk 2.0 movement through a focus on enlightened customer support. As the first organization in the industry to leverage SaaS and the benefits of Web-based communication and social media, ZenDesk provides the only professional-grade, on-demand help desk. Combining the convenience of the Web and agile support, ZenDesk extends good help-desk karma to any company, large or small, looking to offer beautifully simple online support that is flexible, rich, and intuitive.
http://zendesk.com

About Widgetbox

Every day, Widgetbox helps millions of people express, connect, create, and inform with their leading self-service Web widget platform. The Widgetbox mission is to provide easy-to-use, powerful, self-service tools that help Web publishers realize the value and magic of widgets.
http://widgetbox.com