Appsflyer is supporting global growth through self-service and localisation

AppsFlyer helps app developers, brands and agencies optimise their mobile ad campaigns by using mobile attribution and marketing analytics.

Investing in specialist skills to support complex customer queries

The AppsFlyer analytics platform processes billions of data points every day and is used to run campaign analysis, identify trends and provide comprehensive ad performance reports to the company’s clients. As such, its products are complex and require specialist skills to manage. Due to this, the majority of AppsFlyer’s customer support team comes from software engineering and data science background.

“Our CEO was the first customer support consultant of AppsFlyer when the company was founded eight years ago. Since then, our business has grown dramatically and our customer support operations have evolved a lot. To support this growth, we needed CRM technology that is easy to scale and is flexible enough to customise to our products and internal processes. We also wanted a simple, user friendly solution that helps us to be efficient and allows us to capture a 360 degree view of our customers regardless of where they are based in the world,” said Arnon Talmon, Director of Global Support at AppsFlyer.

Using cutting edge technology to empower the customer support team

To be able to handle the complexity of customer enquiries efficiently, AppsFlyer has been using Zendesk since 2012 to manage its customer support operations. Currently AppsFlyer is using three of Zendesk’s products, including Support, Guide and most recently Zendesk Explore.

“With Zendesk, we can give our customer success and support teams a holistic view of our customers, while allowing them to share data and collaborate better to resolve customer issues quickly,” commented Arnon.

Zendesk is also integrated with Slack, allowing AppsFlyer staff to share real-time information about complex tickets and also about customers who have special service license agreements (SLA) with AppsFlyer.

“We use Zendesk in many different ways. For instance, we have dedicated dashboards which provide information on our weekly activities and identify trends in staff performance or specific tickets which have taken longer to resolve. This allows us to identify potential issues quickly and determine the best approach to resolving them,” added Arnon.

In 2017 AppsFlyer considered migrating from Zendesk to one of the major cloud service providers who already supplied some of the company’s core enterprise applications but then quickly changed their mind.

“We wanted to use one single provider to manage the full customer lifecycle, so centralising all applications with one cloud service provider seemed like a sensible option. However, we had too many challenges with the rollout and management of the new solution. Nothing was out of the box and we had to invest a lot of time and resources in customisation by hiring external teams to help us adapt the product to our needs. The user experience was also lacking, so in the end we decided to go back to using Zendesk. The technology is very simple to roll out, easy to use and offers great customisation. This means that we can easily train new agents and scale up customer support,” commented Arnon.

Enhancing customer experience with self-service capabilities

One of the other key advantages of the integration with Zendesk is that it has enabled AppsFlyer to build one of the most successful self-service platforms in the industry.
“Zendesk Guide allows us to track what content our customers are using the most and what are the most common queries we are receiving, so we have created a huge knowledge base of useful content. As only 10% of our tickets are on the same topic, we have a dedicated knowledge base team who is working very closely with the customer support team to understand which topics are recurring and to ensure we have a consistent flow of new information. Thanks to this approach, our self-service rate is one of the best in the industry and we’ve seen a significant reduction of incoming tickets since we’ve introduced the knowledge base,” commented Ziv Bass-Specktor, Product Knowledge Team Lead at AppsFlyer.

Based on the latest data from 2019, 69 out of 70 customers found a solution to their query in the AppsFlyer knowledge base.

A 360-degree view of the customer

Another great benefit of the technology is that Zendesk enables AppsFlyer to get a view of the customer across all channels. Currently, AppsFlyer is using emails and calls as primary customer support channels and the company is planning to introduce chat later this year.

“With Zendesk we are able to log customer support calls as well as actions from face-to-face meetings to ensure all team members have a full view of all online and offline customer interactions. This provides us with more comprehensive data on how our team is performing and helps us ensure continuity of customer conversations,” added Arnon Talmon.

Supporting global growth with localisation

Currently, AppsFlyer has 15 offices across the globe, with customer support teams in 9 of these offices. The company is planning to extend support to additional two offices by the end of the year.

“The expansion of the support team across multiple markets is a key part of our business philosophy. We work very closely with our customers to understand their culture and the challenges of their business. These challenges are specific to each market, so localisation is a big part of our customer relationship strategy,” said Arnon.

If you are interested in hearing more about how AppsFlyer achieved EMEA’s best self-serve ratio register for the webinar ‘Appsflyer – mastering self-service’.