PRISM+ delivers top quality consumer electronics with customer service to match

Founded in Singapore, PRISM+ enables average consumers to purchase top-notch monitors and 4K TVs with affordable prices. Just four years on, it now serves more than 200,000 happy users, keeping its brand promise of affordable monitors that do not compromise on quality. “When we talk about what PRISM+ represents, it’s not just about the high-quality monitors and TVs,” began Jon Ng, managing director of PRISM+. “We want to bring not just great products at great value, but a great customer experience overall.”

To deliver that great customer experience, the company realized it needed to move beyond just email support. “As we grew, the team was seeing an influx of customer service enquiries and we were operating on Gmail at that time,“ said Ng. “We were growing at a pace where we couldn’t afford to have our customer data sitting in different systems. We needed all customer data to be collated into one platform to provide a customer experience that matches our product experience.”

Unified customer views, quicker response times

PRISM+ decided to deploy Zendesk in 2019 to meet its increasing number of customer queries. As the leading customer service software provider, Zendesk gave PRISM+ more than what they needed, with a quick onboarding process to boot. According to PRISM+ Customer Service Manager Joseph Tsao, the move was a game-changer. “When someone calls in, it’s directly routed through Zendesk. At the same time, agents can now actually see whether this person has contacted us or purchased a product before,” Tsao explained. “Through the interactions menu, the agent is able to get context immediately, instead of having to ask the customer.”

The seamless connectivity doesn’t just benefit agents. More importantly, it gives customers an integrated omnichannel experience. “In this day and age, you need to be very visible across multiple platforms,” said Kian Balondo, customer service manager at PRISM+. “Zendesk enables us to interact with our customers seamlessly, wherever they choose to contact us. Having a very accessible support line is essential these days. Everyone wants answers fast. If customers have a hard time contacting you, it’s gonna be a blow against your overall customer experience.”

Optimizing through analytics and automations

Having all customer interactions under one roof means greater opportunities for data-driven decision-making. A favorite among the PRISM+ team is Zendesk Explore. “Explore allows you to really dive into your customer data,” Tsao began. “For example, heat maps have really helped our team in adapting our manpower to stay agile during peak times. Explore gives us a brief overview to see where the gaps are, and allows us to do deep dives to identify specific areas of improvement.”

“Explore also gives us insights on our customer interactions,” Balondo added. “We know exactly how long our customers are waiting for their issues to be resolved. Specific metrics like first reply time, call wait times, and resolution times are now visible as individual data points and aggregated data. We can now see trends, which helps us set benchmarks. Previously we would just rely on industry standards.”

Another solution that helped PRISM+ do more is process automations. A key example the team cited was the ‘Bump Bump Solve’ script. It helped cut the number of steps for ticket resolution while giving customers a better overall experience. Tsao illustrated with an example, “A customer might say, ‘Oh, this app is not working on my TV.’ We recommend an alternative and the customer might try it but it might not work. And then for some reason didn’t get back to us. Bump Bump Solve bumps up the conversation and sends an automated message like, ‘Hey, can we follow up? Did it work?’ As a customer, you feel really good about that kind of attention.”

“It gives us a better reputation in terms of taking care of our customers,” Balondo added. “Bump Bump Solve also helped increase ticket resolution since part of the logic involves reopening tickets where customers reply. So it helps ensure that the concern is really taken care of.”

Built-in scalability for the future

The PRISM+ team is already reaping benefits from Zendesk even though they admitted that they’re just scratching the surface. “Because Zendesk is a very comprehensive customer support platform, most of the features that we might not need now are already there,” Tsao said. “As we grow, the tools that we need in the future will be in place for us to use.”

Of the many things that the startup is looking to explore, one key feature is the multi-brand support that Zendesk provides. “We are looking to expand to other countries and products,” shared Ng. “We already have multiple markets – Malaysia and Australia, and soon the Philippines and the UK. Getting visibility into all our markets will be critical, which is why we’ve already enabled Zendesk’s multi-brand support. Once we have this map of Singapore, Malaysia and Australia, our dashboard can show us key metrics that management will want to see. It might even be used for investors to show how our markets are performing in real-time.”

Things continue to look bright for PRISM+ and the partnership with Zendesk will only deepen. “We want to grow with a trusted partner who is making great strides in customer experience,” Ng concluded. “Zendesk goes ahead of us and advises us about what is working in the market right now. We couldn’t be more grateful to have a partner like them.”