Progility + Zendesk: Faster, simpler, more cost-effective support

As a systems integrator company, Progility Pty Ltd provides critical communication solutions and professional services specializing in unified and wireless communications and applications across industries including healthcare, energy, retail and mining. In 2019, Progility moved its reporting platform from JDE to Netsuite taking its ERP system to the Cloud. Cloud-based services were part of the company’s desire to continually improve its service delivery and customer offering. After reviewing several choices specifically for improved ticketing functionality, Progility chose Zendesk — partly for its affordability but “mostly for its simplicity and its ability to adapt to our business needs,” said Kitteringham, the National Service Delivery Manager.

The legacy platform, when it came to the service desk function, didn’t cater for the ease of visibility of tickets for the technical team or for their ability to work directly in the ticket record and provide updates to clients. The system was inflexible and opaque. Prioritizing requests, adding triggers, and automating responses, with technicians able to work from their smart devices has created desired efficiencies for Progility and its customer alike.

The right tool at the right time

The timing, though challenging, was opportune. Facing urgent internal support requests for the IT department as well as queries from external customers—many of whom were hit hard by COVID-19—an agile, intuitive, and responsive system became more critical than ever.

Progility employees working from home and in the field needed IT help with mobile phones and connectivity. Pre- and postsales staff needed help coordinating projects with customers, which Progility was also in the process of building into the Zendesk system. Hospital and retail customers required assistance with telephones and other equipment. And all of that help had to be fast—and mostly remote.

But with Zendesk providing field service staff access to the ticketing system—something impossible with the old system—along with macros and automated triggers, Progility is reaping several benefits.

Field workers can update tickets themselves, instead of relying on phone calls to the service desk.
Kitteringham’s team can track ticket status in real time and can prioritize tickets and tasks via dashboards that provide information on customer entitlements and SLAs.
Engineers can view past tickets to resolve similar issues more quickly and reliably.
Customers are notified immediately when their ticket is being addressed.

“When you’re working with a hospital that’s possibly dealing with a COVID situation and trying to set up phones within a new area for patients, and you’ve got doctors that are having to work remotely and need quick fixes, instant feedback is vital for them,” Kitteringham said. “So Zendesk’s macros and automated triggers have been a huge win for us as a business.”

Better asset management and visibility into the customer experience

The work—and the benefits—will extend far beyond the current pandemic situation, of course. Progility is using Zendesk Sunshine to improve their existing asset management capability, with an integration between Sunshine and Progility’s NetSuite financial management system that will allow the company to track assets by serial number, site location, maintenance contracts, and the like—an ongoing challenge that may take two years to complete.

Kitteringham’s team needs to ensure the Zendesk-integrated Tempo time tracker is aligned with Progility’s business model for tracking technicians’ time. The company is learning how to take advantage of the Zendesk Advanced Search and User Data apps, the latter of which displays information about ticket requesters and their organizations. With the increased visibility to ticket response and resolution times, Progility finally has much greater visibility and granularity of its compliance to SLA’s (about 98 percent of the time, it turns out). The company can also see when it has failed to meet those service agreements, which may present upsell opportunities for moving customers to different service options.

“For myself, one of the really useful points for Zendesk is being able to track how our engineers’ time is spent and the processes they follow for each job,” said National Operations Manager Kel Gray. “We can ensure the engineers are following the correct steps and make collaboration easier so engineers spend less time resolving issues and therefore customer experience is better, which is good for our bottom line. In addition, with a new trigger Progility set up, engineers are notified when they get a good survey rating—another first for Progility and a morale-builder for the engineers,” he said.

With a 98 percent CSAT rating from external customers, an equally high SLA adherence rate, an 80 percent increase in ticket management productivity, and “time efficiency gains” thanks to the Zendesk implementation, “We’re just at the beginning of using Zendesk’s ability,” said Kitteringham. “But we have an understanding from Zendesk of where we can get to, and we will continue to put that in place once our business is ready to take on that challenge.”

Zendesk has enabled Progility to be more proactive, Kitteringham said. “In my view, proactive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps Progility retain customers, and encourages brand efficacy, so it’s vital for Progility to provide a remarkable experience,” Kitteringham said. “Getting a tool like Zendesk was one big step in successfully meeting that challenge.”