Hootsuite optimizes global CX with an integrated tech stack

Posts, shares, likes, and replies are the building blocks of digital marketing today. And Hootsuite is driving innovation with social media management tools that simplify marketing, accelerate sales, and streamline customer service. With over a decade of experience, Hootsuite has become an industry leader, helping businesses reach key audiences more efficiently and improve user engagement.

Hootsuite’s award-winning platform is the tool of choice for customers worldwide—providing 5-star social marketing and commerce experiences for thousands of brands is a big job. That’s why Hootsuite uses Zendesk for internal and external support across more than 10 teams, including customer support, human resources, IT, legal, and procurement.

Delivering real-time global support at scale

Since launching in 2008, Hootsuite has been at the forefront of conversational CX and user experience, always looking for new ways to meet their clients’ changing needs. “The key opportunity we have is exceeding customer expectations,” says Carrie Wilson, vice president of global customer support. “Today, customers expect services and support in real-time. Accomplishing that proactively and at scale, to deliver a consistent customer experience across many different channels, isn’t easy.”

Supporting customers who are tasked with delivering time-sensitive social media posts can be a challenge, especially in a situation where a government entity for instance might need to send out emergency communications around natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes. “Many of our customers have mission-critical businesses,” explains Wilson. “If their posts aren’t going out in time because of a product issue or a problem with our partners, things can escalate quickly.”

“We operate a global customer support model, so we’re continually reviewing feedback from our customers, as well as from our internal stakeholders, including sales, customer success and account management,” Wilson adds. “Wherever we’re not meeting expectations, we work on driving new approaches and solutions to continuously improve.” Hootsuite is now applying the same forward-thinking approach to its CX strategy that the company brought to social media.

One centralized platform, a new suite of tools

After starting their journey with Zendesk in 2012, the Hootsuite team continues to reap the benefits of using a robust, omnichannel solution. “The power of Zendesk is having one centralized platform,” says Justin Tamayo, senior manager of customer support and workforce management. “Having everyone work on the same tool makes all the difference from an operational perspective.”

Wilson was also a big advocate for upgrading to the Zendesk Suite. “The aim was to consolidate and optimize our tech stack. We saw cost savings by moving away from our previous chat provider and switching to Zendesk’s full suite of services for our support model.”

The migration was transformative for agents and admins. “We now have the ability to provide ease of use for frontline workers, and they no longer have to navigate among multiple platforms. Using Zendesk as the admin center, where we can configure quickly and effectively, has allowed us to introduce change management for technology at a much more rapid pace.”

An added bonus, “The Zendesk project management tool allows us to manage parent-child ticketing relationships, and to quantify the work being done by our support team that was not reported on elsewhere,” shares Wilson. “Being able to highlight the value these resources bring to the support team has been a real game changer.”

Unlocking the power of messaging

After running into limitations with their legacy telephony platform, the Hootsuite team was motivated to find a better solution. “It not only had to work from a support perspective, it had to meet the needs of Hootsuite globally across our organization,” explains Wilson. “We wanted a vendor that could give us live channels.” The support team had been using Zendesk for support ticketing via email, augmented with separate vendors for phone and chat, so the goal was to consolidate those three channels.

When the new telephony vendor fell short on deliverables, Hootsuite made a quick pivot. The team swapped its previous vendor for Zendesk voice support and replaced the existing chat provider with Zendesk messaging, while integrating their original phone services on the backend to handle global communications. It was a win-win solution. With Hootsuite’s own platform covering social media support, the team was set up for success.

“Now, we’ve got one consolidated platform for all our customer service interactions,” says Wilson. “Zendesk allowed us to optimize our support offering and improve our reporting. We also saw early signs of success metrics on first response times for messaging.” The migration to messaging has helped Hootsuite reach the goal of scaling customer support in a more conversational manner.

Partnering with the pros

As an early adopter of Zendesk messaging, Hootsuite’s feedback was essential to building a successful product. “We did a lot of testing and engaged champions on our teams to be part of the deployment,” shares Wilson. “The partnership with Zendesk, the engagement from professional services, and their deep understanding of our business were all instrumental in creating a smooth transition into messaging and a smooth migration off our existing platform.”

Hootsuite embraced its role as a trailblazer, despite initial bumps in data and reporting. “Zendesk kept listening to our feedback, sharing it with their product team, and coming back with a roadmap. That helped us manage the expectations of our stakeholders.” Those early experiences reinforced that the platform would be a good fit long term. Wilson adds, “I’m happy we got back on the right path by continuing our partnership with Zendesk.”

Self-service with AI agents keep things moving

Intent on reducing customer wait times, Hootsuite’s global support and dev team worked together to configure conversational AI agent flows. “As an out-of-the-box solution, Zendesk is a great starting vehicle for any company that wants to get into AI agents and initialize that self-serve format,” shares Wilson. “We’ve been able to build out a flow that improves routing and gets customers to the right skillset in an expedient way.”

After seeing great success on messaging, Wilson plans to explore more AI-based opportunities. “AI agents help us scale and drive more self-service and ticket deflection in a very modernized way and are a critical part of our strategy, paving the way for us to take the customer experience even further.”

Integrations bring it all together

Thanks to Zendesk’s flexibility, Hootsuite has added multiple integrations to streamline day-to-day operations, beginning with workforce management. “The integration with PlayVox allows agents to manage and view their schedules directly within Zendesk,” Tamayo says. “The added convenience of being able to pivot between channels while staying online brings a lot of value.”

Zapier and Slack are an effective duo when it comes to alerts. “We incorporated the Zapier web app into Zendesk to automate specific notification workflows, especially escalations. Anything related to our strategic customers that have specific SLAs now automatically triggers a Slack notification,” adds Tamayo. Instead of pivoting, copying, and pasting information from another tool, agents use shortcuts to instantly create tickets in Slack.

Hootsuite support also jumped at the chance to integrate with Jira, where the software and development teams manage their tickets. “If they’re working on a bug, we can automatically associate problem tickets in Jira. There’s visibility on both sides. We also have ticket sharing capabilities with our strategic internal partners,” says Wilson.

Zooming ahead with a customer-first mindset

In 2023, the team looks forward to hosting more Zoom meetings using the Zendesk integration, for immediate communications with premier customers. “We’re driving a customer-first mindset to offer proactive, outbound conversations via phone or screen-sharing calls,” says Tamayo. “It’s in the ticket workflow, so agents can easily pivot to the app panel and schedule or start a Zoom meeting on the spot.”

On the quest for optimization, Hootsuite connected Zendesk with SurveyMonkey to get more robust functionality and granularity on CSAT surveys. With better access to data, the team can generate stronger reporting on customer experience and customer sentiment to make future enhancements.

Introducing a customer-first KPI within support also brought significant improvements and rave reviews, which bodes well for Hootsuite’s future. “Our internal stakeholders love it because they get feedback directly from our customers,” Wilson says. “Our goal is to find new ways to scale and to be best in class in SaaS for the customer support experience.”