“I hadn’t used Zendesk before I came to Snyk, but then I became a Zendesk Admin – the only admin, initially – so I was in at the deep end. I worked closely with the Zendesk support team to learn more about the system, and it's been an absolute dream. As have the team who have helped with any little issues and provided extra information when I need it.”
Paul Spencer
Technical Support Manager for Europe at Snyk
“All of our internal teams have access to Zendesk tools, including our support team, Technical Support Managers (TSMs) and Account Managers (AMs). We have set up automation, so the relevant people get pinged when their clients log tickets, and they can jump on tickets to help out if they can.”
Paul Spencer
Technical Support Manager for Europe at Snyk
Founded
2015
Engineers working as support agents
30
8.2%
CSAT improvement in the last year
34%
Reduction in first reply time year-on-year:
53.1%
One-touch resolution rate
Developer security company Snyk
From individual coders to start-ups, scale-ups and well-established organisations
Incubated in London and Tel Aviv in 2015, Snyk is a developer security company with approximately 1,050 employees worldwide. The Snyk platform enables developers to find and fix security issues as they work. The Snyk platform quickly finds and fixes security issues in proprietary code, open-source dependencies, container images, and cloud infrastructure so businesses can build security directly into their continuous development process.
Technical support is an integral part of the Snyk offering and the company enjoys working with developers and businesses of all sizes, from individual coders with their own projects, to start-ups, scale-ups and well-established organisations. The company is using Zendesk to ensure that service is first-rate and efficient and customers are satisfied.
Providing superior service from day one
Snyk set up a dedicated support team in 2017 and used Zendesk from the very beginning. Today, the company has a global support team of around 30 engineers based in the UK, Israel, Eastern, Central and Pacific Americas, Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Romania.
Currently, Snyk use Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide and Zendesk Explore to deliver Technical support and build strong, working relationships with their clients. As well as leveraging Zendesk’s tools, the company also uses a range of third-party services, such as Slack and Jira, which integrate seamlessly into the Zendesk system.
Zendesk’s functionalities and integration capabilities enable Snyk’s global teams to work together efficiently, growing the company and boosting customer satisfaction (CSAT). This has led to the company improving their CSAT score from 85.1 percent last year to 93.3 percent this year.
Technical support is an integral part of the product
As a B2B tech company, Technical support is integral to the Snyk offering. Support is delivered by a team of software engineers and customer queries can be complex. The level of support customers receive is written into the company’s Customer Service Agreement (CSA), with premium and enterprise customers receiving even more specialist support.
“Technical support is central for us as a business,” explains Paul Spencer, Technical Support Manager for Europe at Snyk. “At the end of the day, customer satisfaction is what keeps people coming back to use our product. If the support experience is no good, customers may look elsewhere next time.”
Technical support requests come into Zendesk’s ticketing system via Snyk’s web portal or by email. Using Zendesk makes it easy for the company to route tickets to the most relevant team, so customer issues can be addressed as quickly as possible.
“We have a two-tier support structure,” Paul explains. “Our tier one support team answers the initial tickets logged by customers. And if tier one members need further help, they can route tickets on to the tier two team. Any issues that can’t be solved by tier two can be assigned to the research and development support team, via the Jira integration we’ve set up in Zendesk.”
This tiered approach to providing support has enabled staff to answer customers faster. This year, there was a 34 per cent reduction in the company’s first reply time, with customers receiving a response in an average of 2.5 hours, compared to 3.8 hours last year. In addition, the company has also achieved a one-touch resolution rate of 53.1 per cent, which is impressive given the complex, technical nature of customer enquiries.
Better management and measurement
Snyk’s support agents are based all around the world, so the ability to oversee customer support activity and track agents’ first contact resolutions using Zendesk Explore is extremely useful. As Snyk offers various service models for clients at different price points, managers also use Zendesk Explore to ensure they are not overservicing. By monitoring customer feedback and acting proactively on any negative responses, Snyk can maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.
“Customer satisfaction is key for us,” says Paul. “So, it's nice to be able to automatically request feedback from the customer, using Zendesk. If we do receive negative feedback, we have automation in place that will flag it to us, so we can proactively investigate the issue, contact the customer to hear their thoughts, and hopefully turn that negative experience into a positive one.” Tracking the nature of customer requests also enables Paul and the management team to spot trends and recurring issues that need to be addressed.
“Monitoring customer requests helps managers understand any pain points,” Paul adds. “Within Zendesk, we categorise and tag all our tickets, which helps us to spot trends easily. We can say, ‘Oh, we've got a spike of tickets on this specific aspect of Snyk,’ and then solve for that issue or potentially create extra support articles for customers in our knowledge base.”
What’s next for Snyk?
For a highly technical company like Snyk, the cost of addressing tickets can be significant. Its support agents are software engineers and customer queries can be time-consuming. That’s why going forward, the company plans to expand its knowledge base using Zendesk Guide, with the aim of providing easy-to-access support for its developer clients, so they can self-serve and self-solve wherever possible.
“I think we've only got around 230-260 documents in our help centre at the moment. Once we've grown that out, we can provide customers with information on more topics and enable many of them to resolve some of their own queries,” concludes Paul.
Zendesk estimates that expanding the help centre could significantly reduce the number of customer tickets generated and result in meaningful savings. For example, if Snyk were able to reduce tickets by three per cent, it could see savings of £2.2 million per year. What’s more, if the company reduced seven per cent of tickets, it could see savings of up to £5.1 million per year.
