Customer support for a fast growth HR firm gets a great Deel faster with Zendesk
Leading all-in-one HR platform Deel has experienced exponential global growth in recent years. With Zendesk, it has been able to improve inbound support for a dramatically increased number of customers, particularly with the use of customisations and APIs
“I couldn’t possibly list all the ways we use Zendesk’s APIs. Let’s just say that we’re almost at our allowance limit right now, which shows how much we use it.”
Lolu Olaoye
Service Operations Manager at Deel
“We’ve been able to do so much with Zendesk, both in terms of what the system offers and the customisations we’ve been able to build within it.”
Sam Potashnick
Senior Applications & Automations Manager at Deel
Customer since
2021
Full-time Zendesk users
400
Other team members using Zendesk
300
Support availability
24/7
86%
CSAT
91%
of customer issues resolved at first contact
90 sec
First response time on chat
2-hour
First response time on email
Custom solutions feature heavily in Deel’s CX overhaul
In 2019, two recent MIT graduates Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang, frustrated at how difficult it was to hire and pay global teams in their respective business ventures, came together to develop a solution. They called it Deel. The aim was to enable employers to more easily build, pay and manage their international teams by overcoming significant obstacles including global payroll, compliance, visa requirements and local labour laws.
In the intervening five years, Deel scaled rapidly. It is now available in 150 countries and 20 different time zones, employs 4000 team members globally, has grown its ARR to $500 million thanks to its more than 35,000 customers, including Shopify, Nike and Cloudflare, to name a few.
“The future of work is global, and companies should be able to hire, pay and develop the best talent in the world – easily, compliantly, and no matter where they’re located. Deel is the first truly all-in-one people platform for global teams. No matter your business size or location, we offer everything you need to hire, pay, and manage your global workforce,” describes Sam Potashnick, Deel’s Senior Manager, Applications & Automations.
Critical role CX plays at Deel
Deel’s goal is to remove the traditional barriers to work and global growth, and that starts with providing the best unified experience and support for customers. As Potashnick says, “CX plays an absolutely critical role in our business. More than a single SaaS solution, Deel is a highly operational business offering support across the entire end-to-end process of hiring and working with global teams (from payroll and money transfers to dealing with international taxes and visa requirements). Customer support and experience is everything.”
As Deel has scaled, so has its support operation, which today consists of over 700 team members, including 400 first line agents, who are located across the globe providing customers with full 24/7 support.
This support organisation relies on Zendesk Suite Enterprise to enable customers to effectively either self-serve or receive timely support via an omnichannel approach, including Zendesk Live Chat, Zendesk Talk for outgoing calls, email, as well as WhatsApp.
Scaling customer service with Zendesk
Deel’s journey with Zendesk began in 2021 when, on the precipice of exponential growth, the company realised it needed a more agile and scalable customer service solution. “While we already had a customer service platform in place, it wasn’t scalable in the way we wanted. Zendesk provided that scalability and would also enable all teams involved in customer support, including back office and finance teams, to use a single support system,” say Lolu Olaoye, Service Operations Manager at Deel.
The roll out of Zendesk initially began with bringing the respective teams’ email systems into Zendesk, followed by the migration of Chat and the Help Centre.
Once all employees were onboarded, Deel made full use of the fact that Zendesk is customisable. Using its internal development resources, Deel has built many customisations to streamline various workflows and processes. As Potashnick says, “The ability to customise different macros, triggers, and automations has been very helpful to us, especially as we’re creating multiple complex processes.”
Being an agile and flexible solution, Zendesk enabled Deel to implement these changes very quickly. “One of our core values within Deel is what is known as ‘Deel Speed”, which means we all have a mindset of quick, precise solutions in service of the needs of our customers. We treat each customer request with urgency and solve their problems with scalable solutions – we don’t put off for tomorrow what can be done today,” says Potashnick.
AI customisations to further increase functionality
An example of how Deel has customised its Zendesk experience is through the various AI-powered capabilities it has built in-house. Most of these AI customisations are around ticket automation. “For instance, one flow monitors and automatically closes tickets if the customer indicates that it has been solved to prevent agents reopening the ticket. We also have a second flow that uses AI to create a summary of an escalated ticket so that when it’s next picked up, the entire history is in a short AI-written summary,” says Potashnick.
“As well as an internal AI Chat bot to answer internal questions, we’re also working on using OpenAI to automatically transcribe voicemail messages and phone calls. The AI will not only create a script of these conversations in multiple languages but also summarise them,” he adds.
Deel also makes significant use of Zendesk APIs to bring further functionality into their customer service platform and to expand the capabilities of triggers and automations. “I couldn’t possibly start listing all the things we use the Zendesk APIs for. Let’s just say that we’re almost at our allowance limit right now, which shows how much we use it,” says Lolu.
Closely monitoring metrics to improve and take action
Since switching to Zendesk, Deel has been able to provide faster and more effective support to its customers, using Zendesk tags and workflows to highlight and prioritise urgent tickets, and Talk to proactively reach out to isolated situations that would benefit from a call. This effectiveness is reflected in their increased CSAT score of 86% overall and 93% for Enterprise customers. Deel also closely monitors various other metrics such as deflection rates, first response times on chat (90 seconds) and email (2 hours), the processing times of tickets (20 minutes), and ticket escalations (where 80% are handled by Level 1 support only).
Monitoring these metrics helps Deel further improve CX and take action by implementing relevant changes. Deel also has what it calls ticket hygiene, which tracks various ticket stats and reveals where the issues are.
“For instance, the number of times a ticket is handed off between agents on the same level of support can cause negative feedback from customers. By monitoring this with our hygiene tracker, as soon as it gets to more than three or four agents a notification is sent out to ensure the ticket is solved immediately. To then resolve those cases in the future we’ve also created a bunch of different processes to minimise the number of handoffs we have within any ticket,” says Lolu.
Strong partnership for future growth
Deel has experienced rapid growth over the past few years and Potashnick is in little doubt that it will continue on this rapid growth trajectory. He appreciates Zendesk’s support as an agile and responsive partner as the business scales, and what can be achieved together in the future.
“We’ve been able to do so much with Zendesk, both in terms of what the system offers and the customisations we’ve been able to build within it. Zendesk is always willing to listen to our requests and then works together with us to achieve the ambitious goals we have for our CX solution,” says Potashnick.
