Cebuana Lhuillier achieves 90% CSAT and 70% NPS with Zendesk Suite

Established in 1953, Cebuana Lhuillier is the leading microfinancial services provider in the Philippines. It offers a wide range of financial solutions such as pawning, microinsurance, banking services, loans, business-to-business solutions, and money transfers. Its aim is to financially empower Filipinos by providing accessible services through its nearly 3,500 branches across the country.

Pursuing excellence in customer service

The company’s partner and client care division plays a key role in this mission. It handles both the external client contact center and the internal support desk for branches and partners. Dedicated to maximizing value
for the PJ Lhuillier Group, clients, and employees, the division’s mission is to deliver frictionless client
experience through competent service and client-focused processes, ensuring seamless support for all
stakeholders.

As Cebuana Lhuillier grew, this division faced major challenges in efficiency. Initially, the contact center operated a basic logging system, where agents manually entered or copied information for every transaction, making the process error-prone. It later transitioned to an on-premises solution that solved some issues but couldn’t keep up with the company’s growth. At that time, there was still a need to manually log into different support channels like social media, scroll through posts, and sift through private messages to find client queries, which made it easy to miss. The lack of system integration caused inefficiencies and missed queries, delaying client responses.

An integrated solution for greater performance

Cebuana Lhuillier sought to resolve this issue by unifying its disparate support channels into a single ticketing system. With only a small team handling phone calls, SMS, social media, email, and web chat across 3,500 branches, the company needed something that would enable faster query resolution. Cebuana Lhuillier was also looking to eliminate duplicate activities. With an integrated channel, concerns would be captured immediately in the system and the agents would simply respond to each query one by one. Finally, Cebuana Lhuillier wanted to automate workflows, making features like Zendesk Macros—prepared actions or responses—particularly appealing. Additionally, Zendesk offered the visibility the team needed to improve performance. “Our focus and main agenda is automation, digitization, and AI implementation. With this, we streamline our workflows, processes, and rationalize our SLAs and capacity. All of this improves productivity,” says Ruth Viray, first vice president and group head of shared services. After comparing various platforms, Cebuana Lhuillier found that Zendesk checked all the boxes.

In 2018, Cebuana Lhuillier started its migration to Zendesk. “At first, we simply relied on publicly available videos to figure out how to integrate email and social channels into Zendesk: it was that easy! We collaborated with our telephony provider to integrate our voice channel, and by the time we integrated our web chat, we had support from the Zendesk customer success team,” say O. Reprado, partner and client care division head at Cebuana Lhuillier.

Improving client and agent satisfaction

With Zendesk, Cebuana Lhuillier introduced several changes to ease the workload on its employees, starting with an internal AI agent. “We receive more than 10,000 tickets through our contact center each month. That number would be 6,000 tickets higher, but since implementing Zendesk, we’ve offloaded 60% of our frequently asked questions and first-line inquiries to the Zendesk AI agent,” explains Kenjie Meneses, client contact center and operations manager.

The team saved more time with Zendesk Macros by easily generating automated responses to frequent questions, all accessible within the same platform. Reprado explains, “Before Zendesk, we had a spreadsheet with templates of our usual replies to common concerns, and now agents can access the proper responses directly within Zendesk, eliminating the need to switch screens.”

Optimizing operations and workflows

Using Zendesk Workforce management (WFM), Cebuana Lhuillier also began managing team workloads more effectively. “Before, team leads would use a spreadsheet to assign tasks to agents. But now, task distribution is automated,” says Reprado. The company is now able to predict daily staffing needs based on historical ticket data, helping Cebuana Lhuillier manage seasonality and react to sudden increases in ticket volume.

Cebuana Lhuillier also leveraged Zendesk to introduce performance tracking and dashboards aligned with key metrics, such as SLAs, customer satisfaction (CSAT), average handling time, first-reply time, utilization, occupancy, and quality. The company even set up wallboards on the support desk floor, allowing agents to monitor service levels in real time and make immediate adjustments if needed. “Previously, we struggled to track agent performance, but with Zendesk, we now have real-time data to identify key satisfaction drivers, historical trends, and areas for improvement,” notes Meneses.

Finally, the company started using Zendesk’s line-balancing feature. Before, agents were assigned to specific channels. With Zendesk, they moved to a mixed support model where agents handle inquiries across multiple channels. This shift allowed them to distribute the workload more evenly, making it easier to manage volume fluctuations across different communication channels.

Empowered agents, happier clients

With these changes, Cebuana Lhuillier has achieved more with fewer resources. “Since we started using Zendesk, the team has grown by only 10%, despite the huge increase in contact center ticket volume,” Reprado adds. Additionally, the platform has improved agents’ work-life balance. “Agents now finish their shifts on time and overtime has become rare,” Reprado notes. This is a big change from the frequent overtime they experienced before.

With a more streamlined work environment and better visibility, company agents can now satisfy inquiries faster. “Before Zendesk, the branch support desk had a bad reputation; people often complained about not getting replies for days,” remarks Reprado. “Today, all our customer service touchpoints are integrated in a single platform, improving our productivity and making us faster. Now, we’re meeting 90 to 95% of our SLAs. Instead of 24 hours, we resolve tickets in one hour on average. We reply within an hour instead of a day, and I’m very proud.” Jean Henri Lhuillier, president and chief executive officer at Cebuana Lhuillier, adds, “Zendesk has been a game-changer for Cebuana Lhuillier. It has optimized our workflows, reduced response
times, and empowered our teams to deliver exceptional service at a higher level of efficiency.”

This improvement hasn’t gone unnoticed by the customers, raising the customer satisfaction scores. “Our CSAT used to be in the 40s. Now, our CSAT has been steady at 90 to 95%,” Reprado adds. “Our net promoter score (NPS) for the contact center rose to 70%, with even higher scores from internal clients.”

Dazzling the entire company

The transparency and efficiency introduced by Zendesk have made a strong internal impact. Other departments, such as human resources, IT, and accounting, have begun using Zendesk to manage internal processes. “Now that people are seeing our great performance, other business and support units want to replicate what we’ve done to improve organizational efficiency,” Reprado shares. “Zendesk has become the byword for good performance across Cebuana Lhuillier. Our CEO once mentioned that he only trusts a few software applications when it comes to numbers, and one of them is Zendesk.”

Looking to the future, Cebuana Lhuillier plans to automate quality assurance to take some of the manual work off team leads and streamline performance management. The company is also exploring ways to improve ticket tracking for internal clients to reduce the number of request follow-ups. The goal is to meet
the SLA expectations of clients as part of creating a frictionless client experience and delivering exceptional
service.

Reprado believes that Zendesk will play a pivotal role in this mission. “I love Zendesk. Unlike other businesses that push sales, Zendesk offers extra services, like enabling people from different industries to meet and exchange best practices. But the best part of being a Zendesk partner is that it’s not just about the bottom line for them; it’s about delivering the best for the clients they serve.”