AdRoll is a leading performance marketing platform with over 25,000 clients worldwide. Its suite of high-performance tools works across devices, helping businesses attract, convert, and grow their customer base. The company is home to the world's largest opt-in advertiser data co-op, the IntentMap™ with over 1.2 billion deterministic user profiles. AdRoll’s goal is to build the most powerful marketing platform through performance, usability, and openness.
AdRoll wanted to centralize and optimize the 13 sales support teams under a unified and simple to use platform in order to boost the customer experience. The solution needed to be powerful enough to collect and report on all direct and supporting customer interactions to surface a comprehensive picture of how customers receive service from AdRoll. The core problem we were solving was to ensure that the customer experience remained central to everything we did at AdRoll as we expanded into new markets and as we evolved into a multi-product performance marketing company.
Challenges leading into this initiative:
- Solution needed to be flexible enough to accommodate varying business processes for 13 different teams
- Solution had to be transparent to allow our support teams to get an understanding of every issue a client faced at any time: visibility across teams
- Solution had to be replicable for other teams to onboard post-launch
- Needed a system that was easy, scalable, and affordable
- Ensure we did not sacrifice efficiency for increased access to data. Ideally, we would roll out a platform that made day-to-day life for our employees both productive and enjoyable.
AdRoll identified Zendesk as the only platform that was flexible enough to solve the problem. Zendesk’s highly customizable platform lent itself well to creating 13 workflows for each previously siloed process. However, it blended them in such away that it did not feel clunky or overwhelming for the end user. Zendesk also enabled AdRoll to host in-house administrative control, allowing us to analyze and segment data via customer views, macros, and reporting.
Why Zendesk:
- Our end-users overwhelmingly prefered the simple and intuitive UI, which led to minimal investments in training
- The platform was highly customizable
- Ability to surface data from several disparate sources
- Flexible partner in both designing the solution and addressing our needs via their product roadmap
After deploying Zendesk, the way AdRoll conducted business on a global level began to fundamentally change. Now every interaction between a customer and an employee, whether in direct communication or in sales support, was living in a single platform. This gave AdRoll an unparalleled competitive advantage as we were able to better understand the challenges our customers faced, but also those of the many teams around the world working to serve those customers.
We are still early in the process, but we’re immediately able to go in and begin to optimize work flows, alleviate bottlenecks, and make people's jobs and experiences with AdRoll collectively better. As we continue to drive Operational Excellence initiatives at AdRoll around improving customer onboarding, boosting retention, and driving efficiency, Zendesk provides us with both the insights to justify impactful changes and with an adaptable platform to support our strategic needs efficiently.
A study conducted by Nucleus Research calculated the annual ROI of AdRoll's Zendesk deployment as 812%, with a payback period of 2 months, an average benefit of $187,880, and a cost benefit ratio of 1:1.6.
Some of the information we can now collect:
- Turn-around and full resolution time
- Days to onboard customers
- Upsell opportunities
- Churn and NPS feedback
- Capacity planning and utilization metrics per team
Zendesk, Zendesk Help Center, Zendesk API
In order to effectively track customer interactions while retaining high-touch customer service, we needed to evolve from using Zendesk beyond a ticketing tool and use it also as a data hub capturing all upsell and cross-sell interactions. We needed to understand prior interactions, the products they were using (and the frequency), and the products that should be recommended to our customers.
Relying on the same platform to capture support and sales interactions simply and accurately was the challenge and we had not seen any platforms that did this well while also enabling a high level of customization and integration with our core platforms (AdRoll’s platform, our CRM, Tableau). We know what our support agents are doing to solve client issues, but can we also equip them with the right data to make them effective sellers?
We worked with Zendesk to develop a custom application that surfaced opportunities from AdRoll’s core platform. It then made the opportunities actionable, and it tracked the sales pitch as successful or not to prepare agents for future pitches.
While supporting both support and sales, we also were able to track our customers through their AdRoll journey unlocking customer profitability and LTV.
This impacted AdRoll immediately as product adoption increased dramatically, customer satisfaction increased with every segment, we were able to optimize many teams to further scale the business.
We worked to build a ticketing tool for a global sales team whose customers demand personalized service. This customization and partnership took over 8 months. Custom development and usability sessions made sure our employees and customers were happy. This project finished on time and on budget. Effective communication and investment in the UX enabled easy roll out. The project received recognition from our executives but more importantly our customers noticed an uptick in service and support.
