Taxify, the international transportation network company, scaled self-service solutions with Zendesk Guide as they grew from a startup into a five years old unicorn with millions of customers across the world. They experienced hypergrowth, and the issue of scaling has been crucial to them. This company is an excellent example of what you can achieve with smart self-service solutions.

Zendesk covers many industries and sizes: companies that have a consistent customer base, growing businesses and outliers regarding growth like Taxify that has exploded across the world in the last couple of years. Self-service is almost the same at all levels but it in case of hypergrowth it has to be faster and more direct. One of Zendesk products is Guide, a smart knowledge base that enables better self-service. It also works together with Support by tracking customer activity and sending this information to agents. These contextual insights allow them to analyze customer activity and provide faster and more relevant answers.

Zendesk’s Benjamin Keyser, Director of Zendesk Guide, and Taxify’s Toby Humphrey, CS Product Manager had a very insightful conversation about smart self-service that we’d like to share with you.

Why Taxify enabled smart self-service

One of the things Taxify focuses on is how customer satisfaction correlates with the speed of responses. According to their data, customers are more loyal if they had an easy and simple experience; they just need the right solution as quickly as possible. And as a fast-growing company, Taxify realized very soon that it wasn’t possible to treat every issue with a ticket and a conversation. So it was crucial to have self-service as quickly as possible.

Statistics confirm these findings. Knowledge bases and self-service have become very popular. Customers prefer to help out themselves when they can. The statistics show that 91% of customers would use a knowledge base and 76% prefer self-service, whereas 40% of callers have already searched for answers.

Gartner also proves this trend. They predict: “By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.” Forrester and Gartner state that customer experience improves as you leverage self-service. Your agents save time by spending only 20% of their time looking for information and customer support costs reduce by 25% and more. Taxify proved this on their own. They keep providing excellent customer experience along with their growth, though they don’t have thousands of people in their customer support team.

Why Taxify chose Zendesk Help Center

On the one hand, Taxify didn’t have the expertise and people in-house to use the existing self-service tools. On the other hand, the tools weren’t designed for their scale of operations and scale of growth. As a result, they had no data and didn’t understand why their customers were actually having problems. In other words, the lack of visibility didn’t allow them to iterate and be agile with the knowledge base.

They needed not simply self-serve, but self-serve in a smart way.

Furthermore, they required not simply self-serve, but self-serve in a smart way because it’s what their customers expected and they also didn’t want to increase the number of support agents. And that’s where Taxify stepped into Zendesk. It seemed to be one of the best solutions, mainly because it’s so flexible. They could create the system and adapt it in a way that met their needs.

Whereas many Zendesk clients traditionally use its help center on the desktop to provide self-service, Taxify’s case is about mobile experience and for internal teams. The vast majority of their customer interactions with the service are through their mobile app. It’s vital for them to provide support within that context rather than making people go to the desktop computer. Zendesk mobile SDK met these needs.

The typical scenario is when someone is contacting Taxify regarding the ride they’ve just had, or they are currently taking, the context for support agents is very clear, and they usually have a lot of information regarding it. Specifically, they know when this ride was taking place, where, how much it cost, how they paid, and a lot of other things. Taxify uses this tremendous amount of context in their self-service that really helps to get the right result.

How to Get Started with Your Zendesk Help Center

Many customers deal with an empty help center and don’t know how to get started. Taxify was also in this situation where they had nothing because they had just adopted Zendesk. So what they did was looking through tickets, classifying them, and mapping out a hierarchy for the self-service knowledge base. After that Taxify didn’t stop, they wanted to be ahead of the situation and started gathering more data for better understanding what issues their customers were having and then continued to iterate and improve. The key is the iteration, and you should continue to work on the help center, you can’t just set it and forget it. You have to come back and continue to work on it and improve it.

What’s amazing is that Taxify keeps the size of their customer service team the same.

Taxify’s development from 2015 to today is really impressive. What’s more amazing is that they keep the size of their customer service team the same. Toby Humphrey explains this by the fact that they have a lot of data, a proper self-service flow, and data collection pipeline. It means they can understand why people are contacting them and what volumes this issue is associated with. It’s useful for understanding how they can provide better self-service as well as help solve customer problems and take them as input for the product team so that they can help improve their core services. When they make them better, the requirement of contacting the customer support goes away. And this is crucial if you don’t want to increase your support team when your business grows.

Urgency and Resolution Time

Urgency is crucial for Taxify because their customers need assistance right at the moment when they are taking the ride or just afterward. There are many different ways in which people can get help, but the primary support funnel they intend most people to take is to open support in the mobile app. The help center has common problems they may be facing, and there is an ability to search through Zendesk mobile SDK. When customers know what the issue is, they can open an article and read the self-service solution. If it isn’t enough to solve their problem, they can simply go to the button which initiates the conversation, and the agent gets a ticket in Zendesk. The phone call is the last resort.

With Zendesk Guide you can actually find the answer to the question instantaneously.

Taxify found out that customers prefer to use self-service and solve problems themselves. And this again comes down to the fact of urgency and resolution time, with Zendesk Guide you can actually find the answer to the question instantaneously. It’s much more optimal than contacting a customer support agent. If they can’t find the solution and thus they initiate the contact, agents already know a lot about the context: what they’re looking at, what they’ve searched for, what kind of issue they’re having. All this information can be attached to the ticket. So the fast response from the agent is not, “Hey, how is it going?” or “How can I help you” but it’s actually “I know your problem, I understand what you were trying to do to find the solution on your own, and here it is”.

Toby Humphrey also says it’s important to make sure that customer support is embedded within your organization and that it can provide valuable insights. At every other team across the company, they have customer support agents and customer support team leads who participate in meetings, bring information to and take information from the meetings.

Help Center vs. Human Agents

A great help center lets you sweep away many simple everyday questions.

A great help center lets you sweep away many simple everyday questions and your human agents handle complex problems. It’s very optimal because as an agent you don’t want to deal with simple mundane issues that are solved predictably, but you’d like something interesting, engaging and requiring investigation. So this is also important to make sure your workforce isn’t doing mundane tasks because very few people can do small things. Everybody wants to work with smart and capable people, but if you don’t provide them with interesting problems or focus their effort on complex issues, you’re wasting their time and your money.

As an agent, you don’t want to deal with simple mundane issues that are solved in a predictable way.

To provide the best customer experience with Zendesk help center, Taxify’s Toby Humphrey recommends collecting customer insights backed up with data and taking these to product teams as an input. It’s also important to do a content overview, check the way the articles are worded, the length of articles, etc. To understand better when content needs checking, it’s helpful to build some visual cues.

We hope Taxify’s success story has inspired you to create a great knowledge base and self-service that will solve your customer issues and make your agents happier.

The interview about smart self-service enablement with Zendesk Guide is available on-demand.