Vodafone uses Zendesk to support 15K employees

Vodafone Group Plc is the world’s leading mobile telecommunications company. In Australia, Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) provides 3G coverage to 94 percent of Australians.

As of June 2011, VHA has 7.2 million customers in Australia. Vodafone employees and partners in offices, stores and contact centres across the country rely on the Learning and Development organization to keep them informed about the latest mobile technology and services which puts pressure on the department’s support agents to provide outstanding service.

The Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) Learning and Development team isn’t your typical corporate learning department. The group supports approximately 15,000 users and is highly focused on deploying and supporting distributed learning technology. As a result, its five agents must respond to a high volume of support requests, a task that proved difficult over email and telephone.

“When you try to share one email account across a support team, there’s no visibility into each case,” explains David Bedelis, Learning Technologies Specialist, VHA. “You can’t tell if one of your colleagues already replied to an end user or forwarded the request to another department for further research. Too many issues were falling through the cracks.”

So Bedelis began researching ticketing solutions. Although he didn’t have his heart set on a SaaS solution, it was Zendesk Support that caught his eye. “Zendesk was one of the only vendors willing to give us a fully functional free trial, “Bedelis recalls. “That showed me what confidence they had in their product. And once I logged on, I was amazed by the simplicity. It only took 30 minutes to customize the look and feel and get a new help desk up and running. “With Zendesk Support, Bedelis and his team can now see the entire case history for each support ticket. Agents can enter extensive comments to keep their colleagues informed about the status of each issue.

As a result, the team is now making better use of its lean staff. Support’s automated business rules, or triggers, save time for VHA’s agents by eliminating the need to intervene in password resets. When a password reset ticket comes in, the system automatically sends the requester an email containing a link to a support forum page that provides instructions and closes out the ticket. The new automated process has reduced password reset tickets by 70%.

In addition, Support’s trigger notifications help keep employees informed about the status of their tickets, minimizing back-and-forth communications.” When we send a ticket off to another department for further investigation or resolve a ticket, Support automatically sends an update to the end user,” says Bedelis. “That keeps everyone in the loop about what’s going on.”

“Support’s built-in reporting makes it easy to track how many inquiries we’re receiving and our time to resolution,” Bedelis remarks. “We’re now in a much better position to allocate our resources effectively.” As the team deploys its agents, Support enables them to work from anywhere.”“I was recently coming home from India, and I logged onto Support in the airport to close out a couple of tickets,” says Bedelis. “That’s a great way to stay on top of the workload.”

VHA will continue to explore Support’s Twitter integration as it looks for more ways to increase efficiency with Support. But already, agents and internal customers alike are giving the system rave reviews.

“Our employees love Zendesk Support because the automated replies give them confidence that their issues are being managed,” says Bedelis. “Our agents love it because it offers the perfect balance of simplicity and power.”