Twilio drives efficient CX and customer retention with Zendesk

In 2008, three tech entrepreneurs launched Twilio. In its early years, Twilio democratized communications by allowing developers and businesses to embed voice, video, messaging, and authentication directly into applications.

With those innovations, a new cloud communications company was born. Today, Twilio is the industry-leading customer engagement platform, trusted by more than 10 million developers and used by more than 300,000 brands worldwide, from startups to global enterprises, to power real-time, personalized interactions with their customers.

Zendesk and Twilio have forged a unique partnership as B2B customers and service providers for one another. Zendesk integrated Twilio Voice into its own tech stack to deliver seamless voice support worldwide, and Twilio has been leveraging Zendesk since 2011.

A strong start with Zendesk

As the fifth customer service agent on board and a current Zendesk admin at Twilio, Senior Business Systems Analyst Alex Chan knows what a pivotal role the CX platform has played in the company’s evolving tech stack. “It’s hard to imagine delivering the kind of scaled support we have today with the same level of efficiency without Zendesk. We’ve had the opportunity to iterate, customize, and configure along the way. And amazingly, we still have the same instance we started with.”

The Zendesk Suite powers Twilio’s customer support and knowledge base, while an upgrade to the Enterprise tier allows team members to utilize additional features, such as the collaboration module for Side Conversations. Teams also use Zendesk Explore dashboards to track OKRs and generate reports.

An efficient CX hub for multiple teams

Zendesk is a one-stop shop used for tracking, prioritizing, and interacting with customers. While support is the largest user base, other teams leverage Zendesk for compliance and onboarding, consumer trust, fraud operations, and workforce management.

Twilio has extensively customized the platform, adding entire configurations and processes to support individual team needs. And, Zendesk offers an important solution to handle ticketing workflows, including bolstering consumer trust by reviewing tickets for potentially suspicious activity.

According to the Senior Manager of Support Operations and Strategy, Whitney Haynes, “Zendesk really helps us prioritize different tasks that are coming in based on the support entitlement. The ability to have all that information within the Zendesk system has been super helpful for us to grab and go, to help customers and increase efficiencies.”

Better performance tracking and automation

A lot has changed since Twilio consolidated multiple systems into a shared Zendesk environment. Teams created standards on how Zendesk collects and tracks data, and then put in automation to better keep track of issues. Twilio also plans to introduce more automation, such as automating tasks that currently involve manually disseminating information to multiple parties upstream.

With Zendesk triggers, employees can easily sort through an influx of information, classify it, and respond quickly. Overall, Twilio has seen fewer escalations and ensured more consistent, complete service with fewer manual steps since using Zendesk.

“We now have actionable data to constantly improve our operations and measure CX,” says Chelsea Wheelock, Business Systems Analyst.

Good customer experiences promote growth

Establishing Zendesk as the contact software for support delivery services has created new opportunities for growth and retention at Twilio.

“Zendesk helps reduce friction with our customers, so we can increase adoption. We can drive stickiness with those customers, so Zendesk certainly complements the overall support experience for the brand, as a cornerstone of our ticketing system and a general system for support,” explains Darrin Bebout, Director of Vendor Business Operations.

“Our customer service focuses on customer satisfaction to establish long-term relationships that ultimately help with profitability,” shares Vandana Pundit, Senior Manager of Support Systems. “Good customer service plays an important role in keeping customers happy with our products, optimizing their use of our products, and driving recurring business.”