A major home warranty company transformed its customer support with Zoho Desk
The company
The company offers home protection plans that help homeowners cover the cost of unexpected repairs. When customers need assistance, they can quickly request a service, and the company connects them with a trusted network of skilled technicians across the country to carry out the repairs.
By combining a nationwide service network with modern technology, the company makes it easy for customers to get timely and reliable home repair services. Its team is committed to delivering quality service and a smooth support experience, ensuring customers receive the help they need when they need it.
The requirement
The company was facing several challenges before they implemented Zoho Desk:
They lacked a central console to view and dispatch tickets.
They needed a play-distribute model to pull and serve tickets.
They were unable to generate meaningful insights from data stored in their system.
They relied on spreadsheets to capture all agent details in order to serve and distribute tickets and tasks.
The last assigned agent for each ticket needed to be captured in a sheet and updated every time with new agents to track agent assignment and reassignment in real time.
In order to overcome these difficulties, the organization chose Zoho Desk as their help desk partner and implemented Desk's ticketing system for their customer-facing teams. However, they overlooked some straightforward solutions and tried different features within Zoho Desk to address a particular requirement.
Implementation challenges
- Whenever there was a ticket, the activities and escalations that followed under the same ticket were created and managed as tasks, and the supervisors decided the assignment flow.
- Since the tasks can't be allocated with round-robin assignment rules, the customer had built a few non-native custom solutions, which caused them to reach their API limits.
How a visit by Zoho's product team helped
The Zoho Desk product team visited the customer's office to evaluate their business processes and offer tailored solutions. During the visit, they identified opportunities to automate the support process more efficiently. After an in-depth discussion, the team documented action items and worked through a collaborative effort to make the customer's support process smoother and more effective.
The solution
Features used within Zoho Desk
Parent-child ticketing to bring related tickets into a single thread
After the company successfully implemented the parent-child ticketing feature, frontline agents can now link all activities and escalations as child tickets. Tasks can be converted into child tickets within a different internal department. This allows customer support agents to manage tickets from the parent department while service agents can focus on escalations and other activities from the new department.
For instance, if a customer raises a ticket about an issue at their residence, a customer support representative will attend to that from the parent department, while any services and follow-up activities to resolve the problem will be done from the child department. This provides complete visibility into all activities associated with each ticket.
Read more about parent-child ticketing
Streamlining the entire ticketing system to make the process seamless
In addition, the team replaced their way of pulling and serving tickets with the play and distribute model with the help of the parent-child ticketing feature.
Round-robin assignment for organized ticket distribution
The organization also utilizes the round-robin assignment feature for ticket distribution to optimize the process of assigning tickets to agents. Each department can create and apply more than 70 assignment rules tailored to their customer support needs. Additionally, this feature enables the assignment and reassignment of tickets based on specific events, such as agent unavailability or working hours.
Integration with a telephony partner
Zoho Desk integrates with the organization's telephony partner to provide an efficient solution for the customer support team. Call records are logged as tickets in Zoho Desk, which helps them maintain accurate records of all communications with customers. The call metrics available within Zoho Desk help management monitor and enhance their agents' performance.
Sandbox for ensuring successful implementation
The company follows a four-stage process before rolling out a system across the entire organization, including QA and pre-production stages. They utilize a sandbox testing environment that allows them to experiment with new features, customize configurations in a controlled setting, identify and debug issues, and train new staff without affecting live operations. This environment helps ensure that any changes are thoroughly tested and validated before being deployed to the production environment, reducing risks and improving system stability and reliability during the final rollout.
Read more about Sandbox here.
Reports and dashboards for meaningful data
The company leverages native reports and dashboards within the ticket module of Zoho Desk to monitor ticket activity and support data-driven decision-making. These dashboards provide real-time insights into ticket volume, response and resolution times, and agent performance, helping management identify operational issues early and maintain service efficiency. Managers also use Zoho Desk Radar to access reports and track service metrics on the go.
For a home warranty company, dashboards typically focus on key service metrics such as ticket volume by service category (e.g., HVAC, plumbing, appliances), average resolution time, SLA compliance, contractor performance, repeat claims, customer satisfaction scores, and ticket backlog or escalations. These insights help the company monitor service quality, manage contractors effectively, and improve the overall customer support experience.
Business results
Their team is now able to utilize all the available ticket intelligence and related coordinates to handle the key requirements of their business processes.
The round-robin sequential assignment scope cuts down the need for spreadsheets.
The reports and activities available through the mobile apps empower managers to get the best performance from their team.
Email notifications to agents based on SLA escalations can utilize the ticket's native SLA and escalation policies.
Capturing location data through fields enables tickets to be assigned based on time zone coordinates. For a home warranty service with customers nationwide, this functionality is highly beneficial.
Concurrent login access can be controlled from the accounts configuration.
Time-based reports and dashboards will address all duration and time-related reporting and analytics. The system includes dashboards that support native analytics, and users can also build more data inferences.
- Key FeaturesParent-child ticketing, Sandbox, Dashboards