VIVOTEK + Zendesk: Scaling with excellence in sales and support
VIVOTEK, the leading global IP surveillance provider, was looking for a more intuitive, cost-efficient platform for managing customer support and sales. After bringing together and automating sales processes and all customer interactions with Zendesk, VIVOTEK empowered its employees to boost efficiency and improve sales by 12 percent in one year. With more clarity and less manual work, VIVOTEK’s customers now enjoy smoother support operations, rising the CSAT score from 95 to 98 percent.
“Our company has successfully bounced back from the COVID-19 pandemic and our revenue is growing. Zendesk has helped us organize our customer support, reports, sales and leads very efficiently. We can now find relevant information at the click of a button.”
Evan Huang
Manager of the Global Business Operations Department at VIVOTEK
“Zendesk’s solutions are very intuitive. With a simple and straightforward design, our employees found it easy to familiarize themselves with its capabilities. Zendesk’s support team is always there if we need them. Our partners at NewWave were very instrumental in the successful implementation. We wouldn’t have made it without them.”
Mick Chung
IT Manager at VIVOTEK
Industry
Surveillance / Technology
Headquarters
New Taipei City, Taiwan
Number of employees
1,300
Number of countries
210
98%
Increase in CSAT
12%
Increase in sales
40%
Increase in survey response rate
Founded in 2000, VIVOTEK is an award-winning surveillance solutions provider. Ranking among the top 20 companies in the world and the leading brand in Taiwan, VIVOTEK offers everything from network cameras and crowd control solutions to cybersecurity and AI-powered video analytics software. “Our mission is to make our products easier to use for the general public. We want to make them smarter so that we can compete in the global market,” explains Evan Huang, Manager of the Global Business Operations Department at VIVOTEK.
Positioning for scale
VIVOTEK had been relying on costly third-party customer relationship management (CRM) software for sales and support. The company needed a more lightweight and intuitive platform that could easily integrate with other solutions. “As we grew, our previous solution became costly, so we surveyed other systems and discovered that Zendesk stood out with its excellent customer support and continuous effort to optimize features,” says Huang. “We soon realized that it met all of our demands.”
Mick Chung, IT Manager at VIVOTEK, agrees. “After some deliberation, we discovered that Zendesk’s advantage does not come only from its high returns on investment but also from the fact that it’s easier to use. It’s a matter of how much we’re getting out of a solution compared to what we put in.”
In 2021, VIVOTEK deployed Zendesk across 6 teams to serve clients in 210 countries. “We considered the cost of shifting our employees to our new platform. Thankfully, Zendesk’s features, operations, and user interface were simpler and more intuitive. Our transfer took us barely a month,” says Huang. “And because the interface is easier to use, more team members started taking advantage of the solution.” VIVOTEK relied on advice, training sessions and support from a local business partner NewWave to ensure a smooth and fruitful transition. “NewWave was willing to help whenever we had any problems, especially in the beginning, giving us exceptional support.”
Bringing clarity, cohesion and automation
With Zendesk Sell, sales processes—everything from work orders to discount approvals and acquiring digital signatures—are now automated. Leads, contact information and deals came together on one platform, giving VIVOTEK’s team much-needed clarity. “This is where our team can check for any new activities, and preview automatically generated weekly and monthly sales reports,” notes Huang. “The solution quickly spread within the organization. Even local sales managers use this central interface to compare numbers, align processes and discuss their findings.”
VIVOTEK also made Zendesk the heart of customer service, bringing all customer inquiries into one platform and empowering users to find questions to their answers themselves through the knowledge base. To offer personalized support, the company also started customizing frequently asked questions and tailoring content to the user’s profile. “I think that Zendesk Support’s features are quite complete and flexible. It is easy to manage our knowledge base and users can freely find suggested articles relevant to their issues,” notes Huang. With customer support and sales integrated in one system, VIVOTEK has turned customer experience into a well-oiled machine: if the support team has a new lead, they can easily transfer the customer to sales, and if a customer needs support after finalizing a sale, the sales team can transfer the ticket to support.
Empowered agents, satisfied users
With more automation came greater efficiency, boosting VIVOTEK’s year-on-year sales by 12 percent from 2020. “Our local support engineers no longer have to manually create and organize reports, which saves them a lot of time. Our United States branch says that recording tickets has become much more convenient with Zendesk, and our Latin American branch feels like they have eliminated repetitive tasks with templates, shortcuts and tickets that are created automatically. Overall, this has advanced our production rate and efficiency.”
Empowered, efficient agents have, unsurprisingly, transformed customer satisfaction, raising the CSAT score from 95 to 98 percent in 2021. “With our previous software, the timing of our customer satisfaction surveys was not ideal,” shares Huang. “Zendesk asks for their assessment after the resolution of the ticket, making customers more willing to share positive feedback. Now, 40 instead of 20 percent of users leave a score, and we are thrilled to see that they are more pleased with our service.”
Looking ahead
As VIVOTEK grows, it plans to explore more Zendesk capabilities to maintain excellence. “We are opening new branches one after another, including in Japan and New Zealand,” says Huang. “We have big plans for call centers but we may need to customize some features to different localities. When the time comes, Zendesk will enable us to make all the necessary adjustments, helping us offer streamlined, personalized customer service.”