Satrdé reduces service costs with Zendesk AI

Satrdé (pronounced ‘Saturday’) builds solutions to help public and private organizations deliver exceptional customer experiences and employee experiences. The company’s goal is getting teams to resolve issues faster and more effectively, so customers and agents can stop working weekends and get their Saturdays back.

A small but mighty SaaS provider, Satrdé has also built enterprise-class security and FedRAMP authorized solutions for federal, state, and local government standards, earning the trust of more than 170,000 organizations, including top Fortune 100 and 500 companies.

A strong reputation built on Zendesk

Since launching in 2019, Satrdé has helped numerous organizations implement Zendesk products and optimize features to fit each use case. Many are public sector clients that were having difficulty managing communication across separate or siloed channels.

“That’s where Zendesk really shines, by bringing all of those communications into one place and enabling people to collaborate across multiple channels and see everything in a single pane of glass,” says Satrdé Co-Founder and Partner Dustin Swayne.

After years of optimizing organizations, Swayne views the Zendesk omnichannel platform as an ideal solution.

“A company’s reputation is everything in the business world. We use Zendesk to maintain a high standard,” he says. “We utilize Zendesk to help us not only understand our customer satisfaction and track our SLAs, but also to make sure we are maintaining high levels of productivity.”

First CX transformation is a success

Swayne first encountered Zendesk in 2013, when he was serving as Deputy Commissioner at the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce. The team was using shared email inboxes, a call center, and web forms for customer service, but none of them were linked so it slowed down agent response times.

“We were looking for a solution to help us better understand our systems of records and customer issues,” recalls Swayne. “We needed a way to track and understand support volume and efficiency on different channels.”

A quick web search for CX tools led him to the answer. “We implemented Zendesk the moment we learned about it, and we had 150 tickets that first day. I immediately saw the benefit of being able to track every single event occurring across our communication platform.”

Zendesk provided better visibility into the question types, so the team could focus their IT efforts on fixing systemic problems. According to Swayne, “Zendesk transformed our co-operational decision making, because we could see actual data to enhance internal and external processes instead of taking action based on guesses or opinions.”

Omnichannel improvements and cost savings

After that initial success, Satrdé saw an opportunity to leverage the solution in their customer networks across other states, counties, and cities.

“We launched our business based on seeing the cost savings and overall gains in efficiency that Zendesk gave our customers, and how it opened the door for new channels of communication.”

As Satrdé expanded into the public sector, the company rolled out the same Zendesk tools in house. Today, Satrdé’s primary CX channels are webforms, talk, chat, and knowledge base, while sales, support, and project management teams also use Zendesk internally.

Faster self-service and ROI

With a strong Zendesk help center to anchor support, Satrdé began expanding its chat capabilities using Zendesk AI and automation. “AI is a really helpful technology because it pulls from our knowledge center, so it’s going to be as smart as we make it. The stronger our help center, the quicker we can help customers self-serve and find answers,” says Swayne.

Zendesk AI agents deliver automated responses that allow customers to get the information they need in just a few clicks, while deflecting tickets that would otherwise come in via phone, chat, or email. As a result, “the number of resolutions that the AI agent was able to achieve versus just recommending articles has gone way up.”

Creating work-life balance

As Swayne optimized the Zendesk setup, aligning with Satrdé’s mission of “giving people their Saturdays back” was top of mind. “We focus on customer experience and employee experience, so it’s important to find ways to make the work-life balance better for our agents, as well as the end users that our clients serve.”

He knows that introducing new systems can breed hesitation among workers, but that wasn’t the case for his team. Zendesk macros make it easy to streamline workflows and prevent staff from doing redundant tasks. Zendesk AI also helps agents solve issues faster and reduces overall ticket volume, which leads to better agent experiences.

“AI in the Zendesk Suite is revolutionary, because the AI agents create a robust summary from articles, which saves our agents tons of time.” says Swayne. “Anything that we can do to lighten the team’s workload is a huge win, because it creates better employee morale and more excitement around a product that makes life easier.”

Zendesk AI builds trust with users

Interacting with Zendesk AI has also changed the way that Satrdé clients view the customer experience. Thanks to a reliable AI agent experience, AI-powered chat is becoming a default channel for customers.

“The Zendesk AI agent experience has reduced agent handling time and improved the quality of answers that we’re able to provide in a short period of time,” says Swayne. That improved handoff to answer because the AI agent provides ticket context, and the agent no longer has to ask the customer to repeat their question.

“Zendesk AI has built trust with our customers. If we can provide generative AI responses that get the customer right where they need to go, they’re going to keep using that channel every time.”

Short learning curve, big impact

From the robust reporting to quick ROI from AI-powered responses, Swayne found that “Zendesk AI over-delivered on our expectations and instantly justified the need.”

“Now that we have real-time data in Zendesk, I can see what people are searching for and identify areas where I need to make changes,” he says. “Having confidence in the platform that can deliver quicker service and also help track those metrics is vital to the success of any organization.”

Swayne also appreciates the ease of use. “I’m no developer, but I was able to set up Zendesk AI quickly. Zendesk makes it very easy to create and test workflows to understand how the AI agents are going to interact.”

Next, he looks forward to seeing how AI works with the team’s integrated solutions to deliver information quickly. “Being able to leverage API calls from third party systems is very helpful. We have a Learning Management System (LMS) through Teachable, and Zendesk AI agents can pull up your progress and provide a quick link to log in.”

Growing partnership fuels CX strategy

As a tech partner, Zendesk is shaping Satrdé’s customer experience strategy and adapting alongside the team. “Zendesk excels at enhancing the product over time as a SaaS model without add-ons. It’s clear that the value comes forward in subscription cost,” says Swayne.

In addition to having a flexible, cost-efficient solution, Satrdé has the resources needed to educate internal teams and empower clients.

“Zendesk Community provides documentation to not only show what the products can achieve, but also to share knowledge from other users. It’s phenomenal because we all learn and grow together and it becomes this ecosystem of finding new solutions,” he says.

That bodes well for Satrdé’s CX roadmap, because “Zendesk does a great job of keeping their documentation up to date, which creates a model of continuous improvement for us. Zendesk is in tune with their software, and that’s invaluable.”