Diligent, a fast scaling High Tech company, transitions off Zendesk to Salesforce to keep up with growth
About the company
Diligent, a global leader in governance risk and compliance solutions, has over 1 million users across 23,000 organizations, valued at $7B+ and $500 million+ in revenue.
“When you are in disparate systems, it is really hard to get metrics that are the same and equal across enterprise so we were really starting from a position of weakness”
- Chris Zimmerman, Director at Diligent Corporation
Impressive growth comes with its challenges
Through many mergers and acquisitions, Diligent was scaling fast, and as they continued to bring on companies, agents, unique branding, multiple processes and more, they quickly experienced the challenges a company undoubtedly faces with rapid success. They struggled to make data based decisions due to a lack of visibility into key information as a result of siloed data, ultimately impacting the level of customer service they wanted to provide. Their agents were frustrated as they struggled through an ineffective, hard-to-use case management system, on top of their ever-growing product and service knowledge they needed to nail down.
After in-depth research and platform evaluations, Diligent’s leaders agreed that Salesforce Service Cloud would be the platform that worked best for them because it eliminated the constraints they were having. Zendesk is a limited tool that has a number of out-of-the-box support processes that are hard to navigate. After 24 months of using the system, Diligent came to terms that Zendesk lacked the level of customization and in-depth data that businesses, like theirs, needed to thrive. With that, NeuraFlash and Diligent began their journey to true operational optimization and unification.
A new investment and system transition
By transitioning their company and other brands over to the Salesforce platform, Diligent was provided with unified systems, data, and processes. Through a multiphase project, with a heavy focus on the end-users and unique adjustments needed for each business to migrate their processes over, NeuraFlash and Diligent were able to successfully move over to Salesforce! Additionally, we worked together to structure their Service Cloud instance, and multiple Experience Cloud sites, to address the business needs they identified previously to provide a strong platform for the future success of their business. Salesforce also enabled Diligent to invest in further enhancements such as live Chatbots and more Experience Cloud sites.
Managing the Change
Technology comes with users and people who will benefit from someone else using the technology. It has an impact on each person that interacts with the company using it, and changing technology, can impact those people as well. By changing a central piece of their technology, Diligent knew they needed to support their people to influence a better end user experience. They looked beyond the future efficiencies and invested in supporting the people who would be using the system to see greater adoption rates, reduce frustration, and in the end, meet their KPIs. By working with NeuraFlash’s Change Management team, they were able to provide clear communication, training materials, center the end-user in the design and implementation of their systems and even track their people’s success!
Reaping the Rewards
So what outcomes did Diligent see with their migration to Salesforce?
Diligent has seen a more consistent customer service process, as well as a more streamlined internal process, after their move to Salesforce. Service agents no longer have to search manually for their cases, but instead, when a new case is created and assigned to them, they get notified via email. By no longer operating out of multiple systems, they have one place to access the information they need to successfully do their job. Additionally, Diligent is now able to provide self-service to their customers, allowing their agents to focus on a larger variety of complex cases, while reducing the number of cases that gets to agents. This helps to decrease their response time while increasing their deflection rates.
Diligent now…
- Supports a global agent model
- Has increased visibility into their contact center, helping them to drive better decisions, and see all of their data in one place
- Make more accurate evaluations and see outcomes such as TRUE call deflection, which is not possible while operating on multiple systems.
- Evaluate the best way for their support teams to be structured and able to support them better with centralized data
Diligent + NeuraFlash.
Diligent and NeuraFlash began their partnership in December of 2019, when Diligent made the decision to migrate their company off of Zendesk and onto Salesforce. Together, we embarked on a transformation journey across 9+ phases to enable Diligient for long term success as they continue to scale with Salesforce.
What is next for Diligent
Diligent’s partnership with NeuraFlash is strong, and they are continuing to invest in their Salesforce instance to make it as effective as possible for their customers and agents.
- Build an internal knowledge base with the ability to surface the appropriate potential answer to their agents
- Using Salesforce AI to identify the keywords, all to support new members through the onboarding process, as well as the continued support as they continue to add new products and companies
- They are continuing to evaluate their data, identifying points within the system they want to improve and more as they continue to migrate ALL of their business onto the Salesforce platform
Ready to migrate off of Zendesk? Here is a little advice!
How can you make your Salesforce investment as successful as Diligent’s?
- Take your project in phases! This allows you to spend time focusing on the end user, making sure you can support people as they change their processes and take the lessons you learned from the last phase.
- Invest in change management. Technology change comes with people change, and people change can be hard. Good change management makes a huge difference in your adoption rates, attrition rates, and the overall success of your project. By investing in change management with NeuraFlash, Diligent was able to see high adoption and success, while also tracking important key data points and building systems that would support their employees.
- Align internally. Make sure that your team is on the same page as you start your investment, communication is key! By identifying and agreeing on key success metrics, and issues with your current system you want to see solved, you can take a better approach to implementing your new system and to successfully move forward.
- Invest in a reliable system that can grow with you. Zendesk was not a system that could successfully scale with Diligent and they quickly found themselves having to reevaluate their platform needs and investment. This put them in a position of having to migrate their data, processes, and more, going through hard periods of change, that although they handled well, posed as an extra challenge to them.
