How an indie ticketing system beat Zendesk

This is the story of how a small software team (us) designed and built a ticketing system that drives faster agent response times than Zendesk and Netsuite and kept that advantage for 10 years with minimal updates.

Often, we might not know the longevity, but it happens we’re experiencing a cool moment. A system we designed 10 years ago for a client is about to become our customer support system as we migrate away from Zendesk. 

Here’s how it all happened: about 10 years ago, we had a client who wanted to drive behavior among their customer support team to both respond to individual messages on tickets promptly and thoroughly, and to resolve them within a shorter overall time frame.

We were aware at this time that the conventional wisdom would be that the first course of action would be to implement KPIs and scorecards - Pearson’s Law of ‘that which is measured is improved’. 

With support from the company’s key decision-makers, Kelly Scothorn and Shane Stark, we interviewed their front-line team members to see what their daily life looked like. It was clear that they already had a strong desire to respond quickly to clients — they genuinely cared about resolving issues quickly and helpfully. At the same time, the role was challenging. They often had to maintain multiple channels of communication with multiple parties on a single ticket. New information on a ticket was urgent at the time it appeared, but there wasn’t a predictable pattern to when they would hear back from customers or vendors. In addition, sometimes it was the tickets that hadn’t had an update recently which were the most urgent.

What they needed was to be able to see everything at once, with the most urgent information (generally, that with a recent update or which was due for a follow-up) bubbled to the top.

With that in mind, we drew upon patterns we’d established with other similar process challenges, and designed a full ticketing system involving zero KPIs and a lot of empathy. And that’s held up for 10 years.

How do we know this has held up for 10 years? Well, 2 years ago the client (Carrier Access Inc) became a strategic investor in our business, 1 year ago they began helping with our customer support, and we’re about to convert our support from Zendesk to the system we built for them, because their agents prefer it so strongly over Zendesk, and because it is much easier for them to respond promptly to the most important tickets through the custom system than through Zendesk. 

My last post was about UX inflation - how an interface loses much of its value over time as expectations move upward past it.

This experience stayed relevant for 10 years because the client was willing to invest in 3 of the 4 strategies mentioned: originality (it wasn’t a copy of any existing system), optimizing peak moments (we identified the peaks for both customers and agents) and optimizing repeated experiences (the sole major refinement that’s been made in the last 10 years was to the most-repeated task, emailing a client). 

The work pays off.

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