BrowserStack serves 36K customers and earns a 98% CSAT with Zendesk Support

BrowserStack believes that browser testing should be a seamless part of the software development process, so that developers can get back to doing what they do best: building new and better products and services.

This view puts the customer at the heart of everything BrowserStack does, especially their customer service. The company, which has offices in San Francisco, Dublin, and Mumbai, offers developers a cloud-based tool to test their websites on more than 1,100 desktop and mobile browsers. While their product is far-reaching, the company’s support teams are small and need to run a lean operation. Prasun Choudhury, Head of Customer Support at BrowserStack, oversees 11 agents, who provide both billing and tech support for the company’s Live and Automate products. When he joined BrowserStack, Choudhury was tasked with choosing and implementing a new customer service tool to help improve the team’s responsiveness to customers.

At the time, BrowserStack was using Desk.com for customer support. To compare the existing system with other ticketing tools, Choudhury created a spreadsheet with 37 criteria. Then he put CRM products from Salesforce, Freshdesk, and Zendesk to the test.

“Zendesk was the hands-down winner for us. It could take on all of the checkpoints on our sheet,” said Choudhury. “We really wanted a multi-channel system and easy integration with Twitter and Facebook. We also wanted to set up SLAs for each ticket, based on the priority and customer segment. Zendesk gave us a way to do all of that. When we compared the ease of working with the tool, and productivity, Zendesk scored far higher than Desk.com. Another area where Zendesk came up tops was in reporting. That was the clincher for us.”

BrowserStack is taking a phased approach building out channels in Zendesk Support. They began by offering email and social media support, and then introduced Zendesk Talk to enable billing agents to easily connect with customers and to create tickets within the same system. They also set up an internal knowledge base in Zendesk Support and are in the process of rolling out a customer-facing Help Centre enabling customers to self-serve.

Almost immediately, Choudhury began to see the impact he’d anticipated from adopting Zendesk products. Talk gives the billing support team the flexibility to speak directly to customers to achieve a faster resolution. The ability to easily switch between email and Twitter, BrowserStack’s most important social channel, within the same tool also improves the tech support team’s response time. Choudhury also set up automations and triggers within Support to automatically tag and route tickets coming in through their web form based on information selected by the customer, minimizing manual triage.

The team also integrated Zendesk with their own technology. Choudhury explained, “We leverage the APIs to deeply integrate Zendesk with the BrowserStack platform. That lets us pull a lot of customer-specific information from our database and automatically populate tickets.”

Zendesk’s reporting capabilities also allow Choudhury to track key metrics such as first response time (FRT), first call resolution, full resolution, month-to-month variances, and CSAT. He uses the data to make decisions about hiring and allocating staff, and to improve performance. As he put it, “I needed accurate, actionable data, which I got from Zendesk.”

Choudhury also uses this data to provide feedback to his team. He noted, “With Desk.com, I could set an SLA, but I couldn’t see whether my team was meeting that expectation. Zendesk allows me to do this from a management perspective, and also from an agent ticket-handling perspective. It gives my team visual cues so they know exactly what to prioritize without having to ask. This empowers my team to make their own decisions.”

These efficiencies have transformed BrowserStack’s ability to respond to customer requests. The team’s average FRT is now within an hour, and just 5 to 10 minutes on Twitter, where Choudhury says the support team’s engagement with customers is stronger than ever. And customers have noticed—these performance improvements have translated to an average CSAT score of 98 percent.

“We’ve gone from an FRT of a few hours to 26 minutes for our Live tech team. That’s huge,” said Choudhary. “And I would say we’re still evolving with our Zendesk use. We’re not yet leveraging it to the maximum degree.”