Zendesk harmonises SoundCloud’s link to better customer experience and community support
SoundCloud, an artist-first music streaming platform that empowers artists and fans to connect and share through music, has leveraged Zendesk tools to better understand its community needs and create better user experiences—placing quality and efficiency at the heart of its processes.
“What I love about Zendesk is that it is very customisable. You can use it in different ways and adapt a tool to the needs you have.”
María de la Plaza
Director of Community Operations at SoundCloud
“Our demographic is young and working in the music industry, so we need to move with the times, and I think that right now AI is probably the best decision we have made in years.”
María de la Plaza
Director of Community Operations at SoundCloud
Customer since
2017
Headquarters
Berlin, Germany
Teams on Zendesk
CX, Operational and Legal
42%
CSAT improvement
SoundCloud puts AI at the heart of its CX future with Zendesk
“How do I get famous on SoundCloud?”
Ever wondered what some of the leading customer service and customer experience (CX) ticket queries are for one of the largest music streaming services in the world?
“We have everything and anything,” María de la Plaza, Director of Community Operations at SoundCloud says, laughingly.
“From asking about how to change email addresses, or for help with technical problems, to the downright funny; like people asking us to “make” a track go viral. It gets interesting, to say the least.”
With over 400+ million tracks from 40+ million artists—keeping up with customer support needs is not only a business imperative but is often the difference in the very livelihood of an artist.
Founded in 2007, SoundCloud empowers artists to build and grow their careers by providing them with the most progressive tools, services, and resources. It is also the first music company to introduce fan-powered royalties, which offer a more equitable and transparent way for independent artists who monetize directly with SoundCloud Monetization to get paid.
For music obsessive fans and industry insiders, it’s become a platform synonymous with discovering and redefining “what’s next” in the music industry—and “who?” It has worked for the likes of Billie Eilish, Doja Cat, and Post Malone, to mention a few - and it all started with an upload.
Tinkering at the back end of this massive worldwide music production in the digital realm, is the customer support and CX team – 11 people whose roles fortify the invisible backbone for users hoping to solve their varied questions and reach the appropriate support.
Customisable support with Zendesk
“What I love about Zendesk is that it is very customisable. You can use it in different ways and adapt a tool to the needs you have,” de la Plaza continues.
SoundCloud mainly uses Zendesk tools for customer service ticket support, Help Centre, and its Explore functionalities.
In March 2024, Zendesk announced its acquisition of Ultimate, an industry-leading provider of service automation, to deliver the most comprehensive AI offering for CX in the market.
Ultimate, as testament to the unprecedented demand for AI in driving up the speed and frequency of customer engagement, supplies AI agents with enhanced intelligence that is not only reactive, but proactive in problem solving, complemented by human expertise.
She explains, “We implemented the Ultimate Bot in August, and I am of the firm belief that leveraging AI right now is the way to go. It is going to change the way we understand support.”
“Our demographic is young and working in the music industry, so we need to move with the times, and I think that right now AI is probably the best decision we have made in years.”
Of particular use for de la Plaza’s team is the AI add-on feature that gives a summary of the ticket query, as well as the bot functionality.
“The one-ticket percentage has gone up for us a lot since using the tool. There used to be a lot of back and forth in troubleshooting problems over email. We are also able to access more customer data such as where they are writing to us from and on which device, which we had to ask for manually before.”
The introduction of this tool also serves to alleviate redundant and time-consuming tasks that agents had to manually perform—opening them up to do work that is more varied and interesting.
“It’s not about sending a zillion emails a day answering the same question which can be monotonous, annoying and isolating because you see people a lot less when you do written support,” de la Plaza says.
A recent Zendesk study found that 57% of businesses across all sectors plan to increase their AI budgets by at least 25% next year, and 64% of CX leaders are increasing their investments in evolving chatbots.
“AI is necessary to grow our people, help their awareness of how the business works, give agents more of a voice, and make them feel more valuable.”
Embedding CX role as the “eyes and ears of the community”
For de la Plaza, her team’s role is to strengthen the link between what the community wants, what the user wants, and what SoundCloud can offer them.
“How I see it is that we are the eyes and ears of the community. Without community operations, there would be no guide for our product and design teams. At the end of the day, the feedback we get is very important for the product teams.”
Which is why she credits the Explore functionality for helping her team produce better reporting by accessing better numbers to get wider understanding of customer needs.
“It’s about being able to say, ‘this many people complained about a feature in this amount of time’. Reporting is very important for us because sometimes when you launch a certain feature not everyone is going to like it. You must have that in mind. There’s a difference between 20 people complaining about the same thing over 200 complaints.”
Quality over quantity
Moving forward, de la Plaza says a key priority for her is focusing on the quality of customer support and CX their users, rather than placing full emphasis on the number of tickets the team receives.
“Working with Zendesk has been great, I have no complaints whatsoever. Now my goals for the rest of the year and into next are to revamp ticketing by focusing on quality and lowering the waiting times by becoming more efficient.”
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