Jaycar boosts NPS from 1 to 62 by unifying support with Zendesk

Jaycar, established in 1981, has grown to operate over 130 brick-and-mortar stores across Australia and New Zealand, catering to electronics enthusiasts. Electus Distribution serves as its wholesale arm, offering 8,000 products to retailers, independent resellers, and original equipment manufacturers. To offer such a vast product portfolio and run large scale operations, Jaycar relies on high efficiency with only 25 agents fielding inquiries from internal staff, store customers, and its three websites.

Previously, Jaycar’s support teams used different systems for calls, emails, web forms, and chat. “We identified technology as a major source of inefficiency and a pain point for our team members,” shares Neil Deo, customer experience optimization lead at Jaycar. “That led us to seek a unified customer support solution.”

Unifying support onto a single platform

Jaycar evaluated several options. “We started with five solution providers, then narrowed it down to three, and finally landed on Zendesk—it just ticked a lot of boxes,” remembers Deo. The company was particularly impressed by how Zendesk could consolidate communication channels. “Zendesk Suite brought everything into one place and expanded our capabilities in chat, voice, artificial intelligence (AI), and reporting,” he explains.

Implementation began in March 2023, involving close collaboration between Jaycar’s team and Zendesk. “We built APIs to extract information from our other solutions and migrate our legacy tickets to Zendesk,” notes Deo. Jaycar provided training for staff to familiarize themselves with Zendesk and understand its benefits. The Zendesk team also helped Jaycar structure the Help Center articles.

Gradually, Jaycar started supporting its 130+ retail stores with Zendesk across web, email, phone, and internal tickets. It set up macros—i.e. prepared actions and responses—and triggers to automatically direct tickets to the right agents instead of manually sorting through email. Next, it started building a comprehensive base of Help Center articles to support both agents and customers.

Once the team accumulated enough articles, Jaycar introduced AI bots across its three websites to answer customer queries faster. “We were also very impressed by the intent-based AI feature that we set up for our more sales-focused tickets,” shares Deo. “AI identifies tickets that need faster responses, enabling our team to prioritize.”

Finally, Jaycar also started compiling reports faster in Zendesk. “Previously, reporting was always a struggle. We’d manually generate reports in simple spreadsheets every month,” recalls Deo. “Now, our departments receive real-time, interactive dashboards at the click of a button.” This real-time data has enabled the executive leadership team to make more informed decisions. Jaycar’s reports also show KPIs for specific departments, making the data more actionable and relevant. “Previously, our data was often skewed. Some departments would take longer to resolve issues—for example, it would take property management weeks to fix a plumbing issue—while others were very efficient. But we wouldn’t be immediately aware of any inconsistencies because reporting was done for the entire internal team, which didn’t give an accurate picture. Now, we report on each department individually, allowing us to set up specific KPIs,” DEO adds.

Enhancing efficiency and visibility

With more actionable data and a centralized platform, Jaycar’s team has a complete view of what needs to be done across the company. As a result, nothing falls through the cracks. “Before, when a customer would call, the agent would promise to call back, but then something else would come up, and they’d potentially forget. That doesn’t happen anymore because agents can see all their tickets on Zendesk and follow up on them,” explains Kim Davey, customer service manager at Electus Distribution.

This visibility also makes collaboration smoother. “If my colleague is on annual leave for a few weeks, I can jump in and resolve their ticket while they’re away,” notes Deo. This shared visibility has also streamlined oversight. “Now, we even have notifications for leaders in Zendesk to remind them to follow up with agents and make sure tickets are being closed,” he adds.

The customer service team is also empowered to find information quickly and give accurate answers to queries. “Previously, agents would have different levels of knowledge about certain products, and customers might get inconsistent answers. Now, with knowledge base articles readily available, the team can offer consistent support while also increasing their own knowledge. It’s been a double win for us—better support for customers and ongoing knowledge growth for the agents,” adds Deo.

With more visibility and automation, the same tasks now take less time. “With the help of macros and triggers, our agents spend six instead of eight hours on ticketing,” shares Deo. More recently, Jaycar also launched Zendesk AI to ease the burden on its agents. “We’re still in our early stages, but in our first month of using the AI agent, it resolved around seven percent of our messaging tickets. This is equivalent to the workload of 1.3 full-time employees, saving around AUD85,000,” notes Deo. Aiming for a 20- to 25-percent resolution rate through AI agents, Jaycar anticipates even greater savings. “Our executive leadership team was blown away by how something relatively small could make such a big impact on savings,” he adds.

With simpler queries handled by the bot or the Help Center, Jaycar’s staff can focus on higher-value tasks. “Our retail support team has decreased from 12 to six, and those staff members are able to grow into other roles where they can create value for our customers,” says Deo. The product category team now has more time to focus on increasing revenue through new products. “Our focus isn’t reducing headcount but making better use of time,” Deo adds.

Realizing improvements across support

These efficiencies have gradually improved customer service performance. “In the first month since we started using Zendesk, we were able to address 60 percent of the tickets we aimed to complete. By month two, that went up to 72 percent. By month three, we were at 85 percent,” shares Davey. “Since then, we’ve been at about 88 to 90 percent month to month, exceeding our internal benchmark of 85 percent—so the team has performed very well since we moved to Zendesk.” This trend of continuous improvement is also visible in internal ticketing processes. “For internal tickets, we also started off slow, around 50 to 60 percent, but there’s been gradual improvement as teams become more confident using Zendesk. Now, the percentage of tickets done within target is about 80 to 90 percent,” Deo mentions.

With tickets being resolved more quickly, customer satisfaction has also soared. “When we started tracking our net promoter score (NPS) in 2023, back when we weren’t using Zendesk, the first NPS was 1,” recalls Deo. “Our latest NPS is 62. Our customer satisfaction score (CSAT) has also improved. Back then, our CSAT was 55 percent, and now it’s about 68 percent for our customer service team. Across our entire support service, CSAT is 85 percent.”

Expanding omnichannel support and knowledge sharing

Jaycar’s customer service continues to evolve with time. “We’re exploring more integrations between Zendesk and our existing systems for order, invoice retrieval, and customer accounts,” says Deo. Jaycar’s key focus for the coming year is to expand the internal knowledge base. “Once the knowledge base grows, we can start getting our stores to use messaging via AI agents and have it answer employees’ questions instead of submitting a ticket every time,” Deo explains.

Another initiative involves enhancing customer self-service options. “We want to enable customers in a chat session to retrieve an invoice or track their order, even if they don’t have an account or aren’t logged in yet,” says Deo. By expanding omnichannel support company-wide, Jaycar aims to streamline user experiences. “Our vision is to offer omnichannel support for internal and external users,” Deo emphasizes. “If we can make it easier for our team and our customers to find the information they need, we can provide better service and continue to improve.”