HyperJar cuts agent work by 50% by managing Zendesk with Salto

Challenge

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HyperJar struggled with needlessly duplicated effort—and no easy way out

HyperJar had a problem. Their support system was entirely siloed. Agents would log into the HyperJar platform and Zendesk separately—not to mention Slack, which they used for interdepartmental communication. That meant agents were essentially doing double or triple the work, toggling between multiple tools to track down account issues. 

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What HyperJar needed was a way to treat Zendesk as part of its own core product stack—integrate their platform with Zendesk, so that support agents could easily access all the information they needed, and communicate with other departments, all in one place. 

To achieve that, the company needed to heavily customize its Zendesk instance, which entailed changing some of the existing configurations. This was easier said than done. 

Not to mention that no one at HyperJar had a good sense of their entire Zendesk setup. Multiple internal teams within Customer Support and Compliance were using Zendesk for different purposes—essentially meaning that updating one set of configurations ran the risk of breaking another team's workflows. They had to be careful when updating or removing configurations, which is a major pain point when you don't have full visibility into your instance. 

A few different admins had been in the role, but there was no proper documentation or knowledge retention process. “Even if there was a handover, the next person would struggle the first few weeks to understand how everything connects,” says Jake Samson, Zendesk System Manager at HyperJar. 

The stakes were high: if HyperJar couldn’t manage to untangle its Zendesk instance and integrate it with other systems, they’d need to hire more agents to manage the growing workload. 

Solution

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Salto provided a map of HyperJar’s existing configuration and a way to easily integrate their systems

In order to figure out how to integrate Zendesk with their core platform, the team first needed a baseline understanding of what customizations already existed. “We had to unravel how different customizations had come about, what changes caused what, and what we’d need to do to fix it,” he says. While the team was busy searching for a solution, they stumbled across Salto’s content on Reddit. 

It was exactly what they were looking for. 

Salto’s dependency analysis feature helped HyperJar map out its entire Zendesk configuration, surfacing the relationships between different objects, business rules, and agent tools. That enabled the team to understand the potential impact of every change and avoid breaking existing configurations.

“Salto gave us the oversight to be able to untangle that spaghetti,” says Jake. “In the textbook Zendesk way of doing things, you’re diving into menu after menu and putting it all in a spreadsheet to try to work out your configuration. With Salto, everything is laid out like a map.”  

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Using Salto’s deployment capabilities, HyperJar’s team was able to sync the changes they needed to integrate their tools more smoothly. Before, if the team wanted to build a configuration in the sandbox, they would first have to spend hours manually aligning it with production. Next, they would need to note it down step by step as they were building it, and once the testing is done, manually rebuild changes in the live instance. With Salto, in a couple of clicks, HyperJar is able to mirror their sandbox configuration into their production environment (and back), making deploying new changes a cinch. “It’s just a more grown-up way of dealing with Zendesk,” says Jake. 

Together with HyperJar’s engineering team, the admins were able to build, test, and release the integration over six weeks. They estimate that if they had to do it manually, it could have easily taken another six weeks—if not longer. Moreover, “we would have struggled to prioritize it over day-to-day tasks,” Jake says. 

It would have been much riskier, too. “Things get missed when you’re having to make changes manually, especially in a project like this where we had custom fields and quite a lot of plumbing related to it,” Jake says. Salto eliminated a lot of that risk.

Salto also helped speed up some of the daily admin tasks that used to take weeks to get resolved. For example, finding and removing duplicate tags. Tags are used to indicate customer queries related to different HyperJar features, which would cause triggers and automations to re-route these tickets.

“We had hundreds of tags, in many cases replicating the same thing,” says Jake. “Take a simple query, like ‘How do I change the PIN code for my card?’ We had four different tags within Zendesk relating to PIN queries: pin query, pin_query, pin queries, and pin code. “Before Salto, we would have had to delve into every individual trigger and hunt for these duplicated cases. With Salto, we can quickly search for a tag and see everywhere it is referenced in our setup.” 

And since Salto integrates directly with ticketing software (like Jira or ServiceNow) and Git-based version control systems, never again will any Zendesk admin feel in the dark by what’s already been done in their instance. They’ll always have a detailed change log at their fingertips.

Results

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Using Salto saved HyperJar countless hours (and $$$)

Because of Salto, HyperJar:

• Cut customer support workload by 50% 
• Saved the costs of hiring 50+ new customer support reps
• Saved the business thousands of dollars 

HyperJar’s customized Zendesk instance allows agents to see full customer account information right in Zendesk, without having to toggle between multiple tools. Now when a customer gets in touch, the agent can immediately access the account to see where the issue might be—helping resolve customer queries much faster. Says Jake: “They're not having to jump between systems. It's all synchronized.” 

For the business, the results have been huge. “Tickets are now taking half the time they used to,” Jake says. “So we’ve got a much faster resolution time and that feeds through to CSAT. And it's saving us big money on hiring more agents. If we didn't have this, we would need to throw more people at the problem.” 

Salto has totally transformed the way HyperJar uses Zendesk. Now, the team can’t imagine living without it. “It's hard for us to envisage working without Salto because it’s so fundamental to our process,” Jake says. “Salto is essential for anyone who wants to take Zendesk seriously.”