Zendesk helps Printify get smarter to serve its booming customer base

With more people looking for ways to make passive income online, Printify has seen consistent, rapid growth. The company has scaled up customer service in line with rising customer numbers, using automation and AI to help keep customers happy.

“We’re finding that AI can make our workflows smoother and faster, and we spend less time on redundant tasks and more time on helping our merchants find answers. With easy access to all the information we need, we can decrease the amount of time spent on research too.”

Valeria Kast

Head of Merchant Support at Printify

“Zendesk is a reliable platform—and it’s world-class, which means we can count on it to make sure our operations run smoothly.”

Valeria Kast

Head of Merchant Support at Printify

Founded in

2015

Customer since

2021

39%

Increase in productivity in just 12 months

30%

Tickets resolved by Chatbot

90%

CSAT

Printify turns to Zendesk to stand out in a competitive, print-on-demand marketplace

Printify is a leading print-on-demand platform, known worldwide. So far, over 10 million people have signed up to open their own eCommerce businesses thanks to their seamless integration with marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, Shopify, Walmart, Wix and more. Printify connects sellers with more than 75 different print houses in more than 100 different locations around the world. It's simple to add your design to over 900 products, with every order made on-demand and delivered to your customer's doorstep by Printify.

Since it was founded in 2015, Printify has helped over 10 million merchants to access over 100 printing locations and deliver tens of millions of products to customers worldwide. However, Printify knows it’s not the only game in town, and to compete effectively with its competitors, it needs to deliver on quality and speed when it comes to its platform—and its customer service. The company makes sure it’s always available to customers and offers messaging and chat support 24/7.

“Our customer service is predominantly B2B because we talk to merchants and smaller businesses, as opposed to their end customers,” explains Valeria Kast, Head of Merchant Support at Printify. “Our support channels are categorised by topic: print and design, product-related, and account-related queries. We aim to make sure the information merchants receive is provided by specialists, and that they get what they need, as quickly as possible.”

Creating a baseline and tracking progress

Customer experience is something that Printify takes very seriously—so much so that the CEO gets involved directly in asking for feedback from merchants. "Our customer service team has all the pressure of helping out businesses - offering B2B support to store owners rather than their end customers, but with the feel of a B2C service as the people creating tickets are single-person businesses who are deeply emotionally invested in what they're doing,” says Valeria.

The company is always looking at ways to improve the service it gives to customers and was aware that comprehensive data was the missing ingredient it needed to uplevel. It became clear that Printify had outgrown its CX provider when the Customer Leads needed more robust data to improve the service provided to merchants. So they switched from Intercom to Zendesk to fulfil their needs. “With our previous solution, we didn’t know how well we were performing at a granular level,” explains Valeria. “We had gaps in the data. Our old system could handle cases, conversations, and tickets, but we weren’t able to target performance improvements adequately".

“I came to Printify having already worked with Zendesk, as well as some of its competitors. For what we wanted to do at Printify, Zendesk was the logical option. Using it now, we can see many ways in which Zendesk is better than our previous supplier.” Printify is also a longstanding user of Tymeshift and continues to gain the benefits of the solution since it became part of the Zendesk suite of products. With Tymeshift, Printify can quantify the efficiency of service agents by monitoring the extent to which they adhere to the tasks they were scheduled to do. It also enables Printify to identify potential areas for improvement in terms of scheduling and overall agent performance. With the combined insights Printify has gained from Zendesk, the company has improved productivity by 39 per cent.

"Tymeshift is the most logical and out-of-the-box solution for us. It's easy to implement & has the ability to effortlessly demonstrate agent time allocation, enhancing schedule efficiency and pinpointing shift patterns that may contribute to agent attrition which was very useful for us," said Valeria.

Using Zendesk to put the customer first

A key value for Printify is that the customer is the compass guiding all decision-making. The business is led by the feedback it receives from visitors to the platform. Therefore, it is vital that Zendesk not only captures the conversations that Printify has with customers but also functions as a single source of information for the entire business.

“Zendesk provides a clear and concise overview of what the customer is saying and how they are interacting with us,” says Valeria. “We have close links between our support team, and our operational and product teams—it’s not an island. Customer feedback helps improve our business in the round and Zendesk is central to that.”

Printify uses Zendesk products throughout the customer journey, including Explore, Guide, and Messaging, across product design, account management, order management, and merchant support. The company also uses the customer service automation platform Ada for its chatbot, which is integrated with Zendesk through an API and lives on the Printify website and help centre. Now that Printify has Zendesk as a central hub, it continues to become smarter and more useful, as more insights and services are incorporated into it.

This combination of tools is making a noticeable difference to the bottom line and efficiency. For example, the chatbot deflects 3 times an employee’s solved tickets.

“We have a lot of data entry points because we work with print providers and carriers across multiple regions and for different product types. There are myriad things that consistently need to be tracked, maintained, and improved. For that, you need a robust tool that provides access to any and all data points, so that agents can properly track conversations. Zendesk, as a platform, hooks up to anything and everything, so we have access to all the information we need.”

Community engagement is another important part of Printify’s business. The company has a private Facebook group where merchants come together to share tips and advice. The group also provides an opportunity for Printify to gather feedback directly from their merchants and use the discussion to further improve services. Printify gives its customers a voice, and it’s always listening and learning.

Scaling quickly and maintaining customer satisfaction

Printify has seen larger-than-predicted growth in 2023, with interest often coming in waves. The challenge then, was providing the same great service it was already giving to existing customers, on a larger scale and without having to significantly increase headcount.

“We increased our agent headcount this year, but to sustain the growth, we also had to increase the amount of automation and self-service opportunities available to customers. Our help centre, in particular, has been a huge success, it’s been a game changer for us,” explains Valeria.

Printify’s help centre keeps customers informed by answering frequently asked questions, reducing the need for agents to address common queries individually. As a result, the team has unlocked considerable monthly savings. Because all customer case data is logged in the Zendesk platform, it gives visibility to all the agents who might need it—not just the one who first picked up the ticket. This helps maintain the quality of service as Printify grows and onboards new people.

A role for AI: now and in the future

Printify’s vision of the future is one where agents can offer an even better level of service than they do already, but the company recognises that simply adding more staff won’t always be the right option. Having seen the benefits that AI has already delivered to the business, it is optimistic about the way it will continue to help agents add value.

“Printify is very AI-friendly. Wherever we can use it in Zendesk to simplify our workflows, we will. But you can only do that when you have clear and accessible data and information that shows you what each case is about. That’s a big part of our core structure.”

Another priority for the business is to offer proactive support so that customers can be notified about an issue before it affects them. This will further improve customer satisfaction and reduce the number of service tickets that need to be raised because the customers will already know exactly what’s going on.

“I want our support function to work smarter because their time and expertise are super valuable,” says Valeria. “Our agents could be tackling more complex cases instead of getting bogged down in routine tasks. "Yeah, those tricky cases might take more time, but we can free up our focus by letting automation handle the rest so that our team can dive into the interesting challenges where their know-how really shines”.