Thirdfort replaces three tools with Zendesk for unified CX

After learning that their friend was defrauded out of £25,000 when trying to buy a home, Olly Thornton-Berry and Jack Bidgood launched the compliance technology company Thirdfort. The company’s end-to-end Client Due Diligence Platform combines KYC, AML, and Source of Funds to protect life’s big transactions. With this trusted technology, professionals working in legal, property, accounting, and financial services can now onboard clients in minutes. More than 1,000 regulated businesses in the UK use Thirdfort to make client due diligence simple and secure.

The London-based regtech company leverages the Zendesk Suite to ensure an outstanding customer experience on the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) side. Organizations can access chat support with an AI agent via the web portal, while consumers can chat with an AI agent via the Thirdfort app and help center. In addition to using Zendesk help center and email channels, customers can connect with support agents through live chat and phone support during weekday business hours.

Thirdfort’s Support Operations Specialist, Daniel Dallimore, oversees all the CX tooling and training within customer support. He led the team’s transition to Zendesk a year and a half ago, which involved replacing three different systems to create a centralized support hub.

Leading with scalability and cost savings

Thirdfort’s customer service team was originally using Salesforce for case management, Intercom for chat, and Aircall for phone support, but having separate workflows was hindering Thirdfort’s ability to scale.

Agents spent a lot of time manually tracking data and conversations across three siloed systems, applying different tagging systems, and updating Google Sheets. Meanwhile, it often took hours to make simple changes in the case management platform. The team was becoming increasingly frustrated as Thirdfort continued to experience 3x client growth, while still ‘trying to do more with less’.

Dallimore started evaluating different solutions and gave a series of internal pitches to the team. Thirdfort felt that other solutions were either too expensive, reliant on developers to maintain, or not scalable. Consolidating support channels into Zendesk proved to be the best option.

“With our previous system, we were putting money into development, and the months were ticking by without seeing a solution,” Dallimore says. “Whereas, we were able to instantly achieve gains with Zendesk. All the tickets are in one place, so we can train agents and update the system really quickly.”

A seamless transition to Zendesk

The migration to Zendesk went so smoothly, without any visible commotion in the office, that the sales team had to ask whether customer support had made the switch yet. “Everything went perfectly,” Dallimore recalls, noting that the new system went live at 9 a.m. and continued working without a hitch.

He was able to build everything himself, with Zendesk professional services providing guidance on the setup. “We’re incredibly happy with Zendesk as a tool. It’s the biggest change we’ve ever made to the support team function, so the fact that it went smoothly from day one is a real achievement,” adds Dallimore.

Collaboration improves with 360 visibility

By connecting workflows and consolidating data in Zendesk, Thirdfort employees now have a 360-degree view of the customer across channels. That simplifies the process of reporting and sharing CX data across the organization.

“We can quickly put together a Zendesk dashboard or individual report to help us understand the voice of the customer and where support volume is coming from. And, we can do that across all channels, which makes it easier to respond, share feedback, and drive change together,” explains Dallimore.

For example, Thirdfort relaunched its app on Android with improvements based on customer feedback. The product team used CX data in Zendesk to create a better user experience, leading to more revenue and happier customers.

Zendesk support is integrated with Salesforce, which the sales and account management teams still use to track leads and prospects. Integrations also enable smooth escalations to product and engineering using JIRA, and easy collaboration and troubleshooting using Slack.

Unified employee and customer experiences

By creating a unified, omnichannel agent experience in Zendesk, Thirdfort has created a ripple effect of improvements.

Dallimore appreciates that “Zendesk has a training center for self-learning, so we can upskill internally and do agent certifications without spending time and money for someone else to lead the onboarding. That keeps employees invested in their own professional development as well.”

Thirdfort currently has 22 active Zendesk licenses, plus a roster of light agents. Consolidating three platforms into one has improved the employee experience individually and empowered the team to work smarter and faster.

“With Zendesk, we’ve been able to increase our AI agent efficiencies, and we’ve increased the number of people visiting our help centers and self-service. We’ve only added three or four people to our team in the time we’ve been using Zendesk, which has helped cut costs without impacting service to our customers,” reports Dallimore.

Giving Thirdfort agents powerful tools enhanced the customer journey as well. “Whether it’s a B2C customer or B2B customer, everyone wants a resolution as quickly as possible, because they’re trying to do their job or get on with their life,” says Dallimore. “If our agents can work quickly and efficiently, it not only makes their lives easier, but also makes the customer experience better.”

An easier road to optimization and AI

Using the Zendesk platform allows Thirdfort to build automation and artificial intelligence into the customer experience, too. Having the ability to easily optimize is an improvement from Intercom’s bot builder, which the team found difficult to set up without a visual flow builder feature.

“Since moving to Zendesk and having a visual style of bot builder, we’ve been able to achieve a 20 percent higher containment rate,” shares Dallimore.

The team looks forward to having more intuitive, AI-powered tools at their fingertips. “We’re currently exploring a use case internally for Zendesk AI, because it’s so quick and easy to set up and adapt. We can go in and change a bot flow in a couple of minutes or update macros forms,” he says. “The AI-powered voice features will also be a huge benefit, because the phone is our primary support channel.”