Dutch Bros brews up major employee service success

Dutch Bros is a drive-through coffee chain with a mission to make a massive difference in the communities it serves–one cup at a time. Founded more than 30 years ago, the coffee chain now has over 1,000 locations and 30,000 employees.

Despite its rapid growth, Dutch Bros has never wavered from its core values of speed, quality, and service, with a focus on real human connections. These guiding principles not only apply to their customers, but to the company’s employees, as well.

Seeking a new way forward

With a new store opening every four days with an average of 33 employees per location, Dutch Bros was facing a major challenge in scaling its HR operations efficiently while also maintaining its high-touch, service-oriented culture.

When Mike Buzan, VP of People Strategy and Operations, joined Dutch Bros, he saw an HR team overwhelmed by decentralized operations. Each HR professional was responsible for a geographic region, handling everything from hiring and job changes to compliance and employee relations. This led to several key pain points:

— Overburdened HR Staff: The lack of specialization forced HR professionals to be experts in every HR-related process, creating a high-touch but inefficient system.

— Inconsistent Service & Compliance Risks: Employees seeking support often received different answers from different HR team members, and critical compliance tasks were difficult to track.

— Lack of Documentation & Self-Service: HR relied on “tribal knowledge”—veteran employees memorized complex policies without a centralized knowledge base for reference.

— Work-Life Balance Concerns: Many HR team members worked from personal devices, with field leaders reaching out at all hours.

“The rapid pace of growth made it really hard for anyone to pause and think outside the box,” recalls Buzan. “The challenge was clear–we needed to move from a reactive state to building something simple, scalable, and repeatable.”

Looking for the right HR solution

Although Dutch Bros’ Customer Experience (CX) team was already using Zendesk, Buzan conducted a months-long vendor search to find the right system. In the end, Zendesk was selected for its ability to help the HR team centralize knowledge, standardize processes, and automate to scale with the rapid business growth.

The results have been nothing short of transformational—driving efficiency, reducing resolution times, and improving the experience of the coffee chain’s employees at every level.

First order of business

Buzan envisioned an HR transformation that mirrored a manufacturing assembly line, breaking down complex HR tasks into structured, repeatable workflows. Zendesk became the backbone of this new approach, supporting Dutch Bros’ vision with:

— A Centralized HR Operations Center (HROC): Inspired by the concept of an air traffic controller, all incoming HR tasks now flow from Workday through Zendesk, where they are triaged and assigned via omnichannel routing.

— Self-Service Knowledge Base: Zendesk’s help center feature enabled Dutch Bros to create both an internal knowledge base for HR professionals and an employee-facing help center, reducing dependence on tribal knowledge and empowering employees to self-serve.

— Service Level Agreements (SLAs) & Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): Zendesk helped define service expectations and enforce consistency across all HR transactions.

— Automation for Compliance & Efficiency: By connecting Workday with Zendesk and implementing time-based automations to ensure nothing slips through the cracks, Dutch Bros automated critical compliance processes, ensuring timely delivery of required documents and reducing errors.

Removing bottlenecks to increase speed of service

“The first challenge we tackled was centralization, which we broke down into two segments: how to centralize the tasks and how to centralize the resources,“ explains Samantha Ramirez, Employee Experience ITSM Administrator at Dutch Bros.

Instead of assigning tasks to individuals, every HR incoming task now goes to the Operations Center (HROC) first, then is created as a ticket in Zendesk and assigned via omnichannel routing to the first available agent.

“Just that change alone removed many bottlenecks from the system and highlighted the speed element of our promise to employees regarding speed, quality, and service,” shares Ramirez.

To better serve their workforce by meeting employees where they are, Dutch Bros added SMS as a support channel. “Our employees don’t want to send an email to ask about sick time, or benefits,” notes Ramirez. SMS tickets are routed through Zendesk like any other ticket but because of the efficient model and fast resolution time, employees experience the interaction like a live conversation.

Integration with Workday

A key element of the Dutch Bros’ centralization process was partnering with their Workday team to break down HR tasks, triggering emails to Zendesk for each task. The HR team was able to easily connect Workday with Zendesk without any need for complicated coding or API integrations using the Zendesk email channel.

Once centralized, the team was able to layer in automation for things like prioritizing work, routing, even automating compliance-related processes using the email connection with Workday.

For cases such as employee terminations, where things have to be delivered to the employee in a specific timeframe, the system automatically serves up the documents, ensuring compliance with government regulations.

Say goodbye to tribal knowledge

Streamlining the transactional element of HR was one pillar of the transformation project but documenting and centralizing HR knowledge was equally important.

“This was a huge part of the ‘why Zendesk’ piece, as we were able to do both in the same system with a small project team rather than bringing on new knowledge management software,” says Buzan.

Prior to the implementation of Zendesk, there was no formal system to support knowledge sharing. “Now, all of that content is just a click away with knowledge in the context panel,” says Ramirez. “We can even serve appropriate resources based on the ticket being viewed, saving so much time and effort for our internal team.’

Today, Dutch Bros’ HR professionals can easily answer employee questions without having to memorize complex state and federal regulations. Meanwhile, the company’s employees can now access key information themselves to self-serve answers to common questions.

Faster resolutions, increased productivity

The results of implementing Zendesk for the HR function at Dutch Bros have been significant:

— 212 percent increase in HR team productivity
— 57 percent decrease in active time spent per hire (from 22.4 minutes to 9.7 minutes)
— 69 percent decrease in active time spent per job change admin (from 59.4 minutes to 18.5 minutes)
— Decrease in resolution time from 23 hours to just 1.3 minutes

“Tasks that used to take days now take minutes,” says Ramirez. “But one thing you don’t see in the metrics is that we were able to achieve this success without adding a single headcount to our team. That’s amazing considering the rapid growth our company is experiencing.”

Bringing AI to employee service

With a strong foundation in place, Dutch Bros is now looking ahead to AI-driven improvements. Ramirez envisions AI enhancing self-service capabilities and further automating transactional tasks.

“Once we get to a place where those transactional elements are standardized and easily replicated, that’s when we start building AI so we can hand off tasks to an AI agent and empower our human agents to take on more of the personal elements of the employee service model.”

Dutch Bros also plans to expand its Zendesk-driven employee service model beyond HR, incorporating IT and other internal service teams to create a standardized model across the organization.

In fact, the team is already looking at a new IT incident management process with Zendesk. The Dutch Bros IT team currently uses SweetHawk to automatically attach easy-to-follow task lists, or preconfigured approval workflows to common request types. Based on the efficiency gains they’ve seen, they plan to extend this partner app to the HR Team.

Data drives the way forward

As Dutch Bros looks to double the number of locations in the next few years, the HR team now feels confident that it can manage the company’s growth with the Zendesk employee service solution.

A key asset the team plans to leverage in support of its continuous process improvement approach are the metrics and data they now receive from the Zendesk platform.

“Going forward, we’ll be improving operations through data-driven problem-solving, having total team visibility into performance metrics,” says Buzan. “My philosophy is that productivity is simply an outcome of solving the right problems.”

Buzan adds, “In the future, we won’t hide problems—we’ll celebrate them,” Buzan says. “This mindset unlocks diversity of thought and makes problem-solving a true team sport. I always say, ‘Problems are treasures.’”