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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/New York, US
SAAS
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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"
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:
Here are the things that stood out:
Chronosphere has a few key features on its wishlist that they believe could further enhance their customer support processes.
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.
