EBP Group: growing with Zendesk today and tomorrow

The EBP Group has come a long way in the last five years. First focusing on very small companies, the French management software company has moved upmarket and grown in popularity amongst SMBs.

In 2019, EBP also set up an Engineering Business Unit in order to serve large accounts and provide specific services, particularly in the insurance industry.

The family business also opened up to the international market, expanding into Morocco, Spain and the Ivory Coast. The evolution of their business model is proving successful, with the French company achieving 12% growth in 2021 and increasing its workforce from 300 to 600 employees since 2017.

Zendesk: the core of a customer-centric organization

In order to carry out this ambitious strategy, the EBP Group first had to take a step forward in terms of customer relationship management. In 2017, Zendesk Enterprise was integrated alongside the reorganization of their technical support, which laid the foundation for becoming a customer-centric company. “Previously, we managed technical support by email. We didn’t pick up calls, there was no follow-up and no monitoring of customer satisfaction or NPS. It was a bit amateurish. We did not know how many customers needed help and what volume of requests needed to be processed,” says Marie Amiot, Director of Customer Relations at EBP.

“Zendesk was instrumental in the overhaul of our after-sales service. But it didn’t stop there. At EBP, we believe that every one of us, regardless of their position, is responsible for customer satisfaction. To make communication between our departments easier, we also rolled out Zendesk to manage technical support for our pre-sales and consulting teams, sales teams, ADV, EBP Academy, and R&D teams. Today, we have nearly 250 internal users.”

Creating 100% tailor-made CRM

Deploying Zendesk within the various EBP departments has contributed to making customer service more professional and standardized. “The core use of Zendesk is ticketing. Our teams handle around 15,000 tickets per month. We have also deployed a help center in France, as well as in Spain, Morocco, and the Ivory Coast. With numerous articles and video tutorials, these help centers provide 24/7 online, self-service technical support. In total, they are viewed 50,000 times a month, with nearly 1.5 million articles viewed in 2021,” adds Amiot.

Zendesk’s tailor-made CRM model has also opened up a wide range of possibilities for the EBP Group. “Zendesk is a very interoperable tool. In addition to its native features, you can easily add third-party applications. It allowed us to build a tailor-made ecosystem aligned with our challenges and needs. Internally, we are quite autonomous. So, we can take it quite far in terms of settings.”

Tangible results

Thanks to Zendesk, new processes and best practices have been gradually implemented within the EBP teams over the past five years. “As of 2017-2018, we began to monitor ticket stocks, SLAs, and average processing times, which we did not do at all before,” explains Amiot. “But above all, we now process all the feedback from our customers. When one of them congratulates or thanks us, we share it with our teams. Conversely, we call back 100% of unhappy customers to solve their problems. We compile a monthly summary of all this positive or negative feedback, which we combine with our e-reputation management, by putting a verified opinion or Trustpilot in our email signature.”

And the results of this approach are tangible. “The post-ticket satisfaction survey response rate is around 35%, which is a good score. Our goal is to maintain our customer satisfaction rate at its current level: between 85% and 89% depending on our brands. Zendesk has allowed us to optimize our resource planning and reduce our processing times to a maximum of 48 hours or 36 hours on average. Even if we haven’t actually measured it, our productivity has definitely increased since we started using Zendesk.”

Shared future

Building on this successful partnership, EBP intends more than ever to build its future with Zendesk by its side. “Zendesk has become vital to EBP. The solution is very popular amongst our teams and it follows us through all our projects. At once robust and flexible, it is able to grow with us. Whatever the size of the project, it’s always easy,” adds Amiot. “We also have excellent contacts with our Zendesk Customer Success Manager. Business reviews, workshops, and regular monitoring of indicators help us to continuously improve the use of the tool.”

In the past five years, customer use cases have changed, so one of the challenges for EBP will be to think about the integration of new media with Zendesk. “Ideally, we should be able to switch to WhatsApp in 2023. It is a super-convenient channel, which our teams and B2B customers value. We trust Zendesk to continue to support us in our growth. Whether in terms of number of users, views, channels or media… the tool will adapt to our current and future needs.”