Case Study

Improving Support Workflow: Chronosphere's Successful Slack-Zendesk Integration with ClearFeed

With Tom Walker, Head of Customer Support Engineering at Chronosphere
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Company Goal

Chronosphere is the only observability platform that puts you back in control by taming rampant data growth and cloud native complexity, delivering increased business confidence. Their mission is to guide modern businesses to leverage observability as an essential competitive advantage.

https://chronosphere.io/

HeadQuarters

New York, US

Industry

SAAS

Summary

Chronosphere, a cloud-native observability platform, prioritised maintaining support quality as the company scaled, but had to manage a growing team and rapidly-expanding number of Slack channels with customers. To address this, they sought a solution to integrate Slack and Zendesk bi-directionally, streamlining communication and support management. 

They identified essential criteria for their ideal solution, including ease of use, full bi-directional support, low maintenance requirements, and the ability to leverage existing SLAs and workflows on Zendesk.

The ClearFeed integration proved to be the perfect fit for Chronosphere, offering quick and easy setup with minimal IT overhead. It significantly improved adoption rates and allowed customers to submit support queries effortlessly by adding an emoji to a Slack thread. 

The support teams gained flexibility to work from both Slack and Zendesk, with conversations synchronized in real-time. The integration also featured an announcement feature, making it convenient to broadcast communications to multiple channels simultaneously.

About Chronosphere

Chronosphere is the only observability platform that puts companies back in control by taming rampant data growth and cloud native complexity, delivering increased business confidence.

A pillar of the company’s go-to-market approach includes providing a high-touch, white gloved customer experience throughout the entire customer journey for its roster of enterprise customers. Chronosphere follows a model where the customer success team partners with the customers through the entire account lifecycle.

Multiple teams from Chronosphere are engaged in the implementation process, including Technical Account Management (TAM), Solution Architects, Customer Education, and the Customer Support Engineering team. While the TAM team serves as the initial customer contact, they collaborate with other teams to address customer issues. The Customer Support Engineering team plays a crucial role in handling ongoing customer inquiries about data and platform-related matters.

In this discussion, we'll explore how Tom Walker, Head of Customer Support Engineering at Chronosphere, highlights the value generated through the implementation of ClearFeed within their support stack.

Slack and Zendesk

The teams at Chronosphere maintain strong collaboration with their enterprise customers by creating dedicated Slack channels for communication. This inclusive approach involves key teams such as TAM, Solution Architects, Technical Support, and Customer Education, all working seamlessly with their respective customers. As a result, they have experienced significant benefits, including:

  1. Meet Customers Where They Are: It's helpful to communicate through a platform  that customers are already comfortable with. This significantly reduces friction of communication, especially during a long cycle of implementation.
  2. White Glove Service: Slack enables Chronosphere to provide a personalized and high-touch customer support experience to customers.
  3. Build Deep Connections: When the goal is to create a partnership instead of a transactional relationship, a deeper connection is required. Slack allows for this by making customers feel like Chronosphere is a part of their team.

Although Slack is excellent for real-time conversations and collaboration, it might not be the most suitable platform for managing support at scale. 

Recognizing this, the technical support team at Chronosphere made a strategic decision to adopt Zendesk as their primary support tool. Zendesk provides a robust system for tracking support issues across customers, ensuring timely responses, managing Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and offering comprehensive analytics.

The missing piece of the puzzle was a robust way to integrate Slack with Zendesk.

Limitations of Zendesk Slack Native Integration

The team encountered a major challenge in the form of disconnected silos between Slack and Zendesk. Although Zendesk offers a native Slack connector, its adoption rate was disappointingly low. This issue primarily stemmed from:

  1. Lack of ease of use for both internal teams and customers - You have to disrupt the flow of the conversation and invoke a few shortcuts to create tickets.  
  2. A one-directional flow of information that is designed to take the conversation out of Slack to in email. This breaks the flow of customer conversations and the intention of Slack-centric support.

Because of these issues, a lot of support issues were getting solved in Slack and weren’t getting logged in Zendesk as tickets. This was making things hard to track and drive reporting and metrics. 
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Tom had a significant concern as the team and the number of Slack channels continued to scale. Consequently, they sought a robust solution to bi-directionally integrate Slack and Zendesk, aiming to manage Slack channels more effectively.

"More metrics, more info is always appreciated"

Chronosphere’s Ideal Partner

In the face of Chronosphere's growing challenges, the team identified several essential criteria that an ideal solution should fulfil to meet their requirements. Let's explore these key aspects:

  1. Ease of Use and Integration: The solution should be user-friendly and easily integrate into their existing workflow.
  2. Full Bi-directional Support: It should allow seamless communication and data exchange between Slack and Zendesk in both directions.
  3. Low Maintenance Requirements: The chosen solution should be low-maintenance, requiring minimal effort to integrate and manage.
  4. Leveraging Existing SLAs and Workflows on Zendesk: The solution must be capable of leveraging and incorporating their existing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and workflows within Zendesk.

The ClearFeed Advantage and Impact

Here are the things that stood out:

  • Quick and Easy Setup: It took only 5 minutes to set the integration up with zero overheads from IT. Additionally, introducing the team to the processes and getting them acquainted with the workflow took only another 10 minutes.
  • Self-Serve for Customers: ClearFeed enables customers with the ability to submit support queries to Zendesk by simply adding an emoji to a Slack thread, which is a substantial improvement compared to native Zendesk connector which was fairly clunky.
  • Dramatically Improved Adoption of ClearFeed's Slack-Zendesk connector: In the first four months of use, the percentage of tickets created via ClearFeed has steadily increased: 12%, 39%, 68%, 79%, 86%.
  • Flexibility for Support Teams to work from both Slack and Zendesk: Support teams can work from either interfaces with the conversations in sync in real time across both platforms. Further, on Slack the conversations from all channels get consolidated in a single queue in a single triage channel.
  • Announcement Feature: Using this feature they can broadcast announcements across multiple channels at a time. There have been scenarios where they had to send out communications to the entire customer base and they have been able to avoid the whole copy-paste exercise.

Wishlist

Chronosphere has a few key features on its wishlist that they believe could further enhance their customer support processes.

  1. Setting Priority of Zendesk Tickets from Slack
  2. Microsoft Teams Integration

Note: Based on the the feedback, the team at ClearFeed has already shipped the ability for customers to edit priority of Zendesk tickets from Slack.

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