The best marketing is a great customer experience

Successful businesses are built on more than just a great idea. Products don’t always speak for themselves. You need to spread the word and nurture customer relationships, but marketing is often a new and daunting task for many entrepreneurs.

Fortunately, SendinBlue, a cloud-based digital marketing platform, allows you to easily start marketing your new solution or product before you’ve even applied for a small business loan.

“The basic idea behind SendinBlue is to offer the best marketing tools to anyone who needs to grow their business regardless of their marketing expertise,” explained Guillaume Rieu, Chief Customer Care Officer at SendinBlue.

That’s key to SendinBlue’s success strategy, to support customers knowing that marketing is just one of the many hats a typical SendinBlue customer wears. There’s an urgency reflected in the company’s client base. “Let’s say you’re running a restaurant,” Rieu said. “You don’t have an entire day dedicated to marketing; you have this one hour and you want to be able to get an answer in that hour.”

Speed has been an imperative to the business, and its support team, long before Rieu joined in 2015. Back then, the support team was composed of only four people, offering support in English. Since then, the team has grown to 62 agents based out of offices in France, India, and Seattle, WA that provide support in six languages to more than 50,000 businesses.

As the support team expanded, SendinBlue outgrew the ticketing system it built in-house. That home-grown system lacked the capability to track the customer journey and report key metrics, features that Rieu felt were imperative to providing a good customer experience. He also realised that a new system needed to be able to scale as SendinBlue continued to grow. By May 2016, he found exactly what he was looking for in Zendesk.

“We really wanted the best in the market. We knew that Zendesk would be reliable,” he said.

From initial implementation to onboarding agents, rolling out Zendesk Support took only about a month. Largely self-driven, Rieu was able to train his team without much outside help. “I was concerned that changing solutions would confuse the agents,” he said, “but the team adjusted to Zendesk quickly.”

Rieu and the team spent the initial year setting up and refining the system. SendinBlue chose to start out with Support for email tickets. The next month, they turned on the satisfaction rating feature and integrated social media channels. Soon after that, Rieu integrated SendinBlue’s voice channel support into Support to create tickets for every phone call. By the end of 2016, the team was ready to launch a help center using Zendesk Guide, which has seen steady adoption. A year and a half later, the help center sees roughly 150,000 views each month.

If 2016 was all about laying a solid support foundation, 2017 was focused on building on top of that. SendinBlue’s support team continued adding triggers and fine-tuning existing processes around ticket prioritisation, routing, and automation.

These purposeful improvements immediately improved agent productivity. As the company tripled its customer base, Rieu only had to double the support team to keep up with the uptick in tickets. Self-service plays a large role, as each client now submits fewer tickets, on average. Agents are also able to handle more tickets, partly due to SendinBlue’s the longevity of many SendinBlue agents.

“It’s really important to have loyal employees if you want to grow a company long term,” he said. “If someone works for you for 10 years, then they have a wealth of knowledge about the company. When problems arise, they know why—and how to fix them.”

With greater visibility into customer interactions and the ability to work out of one centralised tool, agents are able to take on more responsibilities. Once an agent has enough knowledge to answer any ticket, Rieu seeks to challenge them to work on other projects like creating help center content and implementing new support channels.

“We’re not losing time anymore,” said Rieu. “Agents have their Zendesk tab open and don’t need to switch screens to gather all the client’s information.”

The entire company highly values customer satisfaction—executive leadership, and the sales and product teams all have visibility into Zendesk tickets, making it easy for other departments to jump in and provide assistance if an agent requires more expertise. An integration with JIRA also allows support to collaborate with the product and engineering teams.

Agents rely on the Five Most Recent app for easy access to a client’s past tickets, which allows agents to resolve a ticket without asking the client a question they might have already answered. Thanks to its dedication to customer satisfaction, SendinBlue is able to report a CSAT score of 89 percent, a seven percent increase since switching over to Zendesk.

Rieu also values how simple change management has been with Zendesk. “If I feel like a section in the help center is not clear enough, I can easily edit or recreate it. I did that this afternoon, in just one hour.”

SendinBlue is always looking for ways to improve their support, so Rieu values the yearly optimisation calls he has with their Zendesk account manager, who has been able to help resolve small bugs, suggest improvements, and review SendinBlue’s implementation. “She’s made everyone’s lives easier—and she was proud of what we had accomplished on our own,” he said.