Next Insurance automates 84% of Zendesk configuration deployments with Salto

Next Insurance offers a range of insurance products tailored specifically for small businesses. Their Information Systems team, responsible for managing various SaaS platforms including Zendesk, sought to enhance their continuous deployment processes and improve overall team efficiency and release quality. Using Salto, the team transformed their operations, gaining efficiency, accuracy, and a much-improved work-life balance.

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Finally gaining effective use of Zendesk’s sandbox

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Next Insurance’s Zendesk setup includes three production environments supporting their business units. Each production environment is connected to two additional sandboxes, for a three-tiered architecture: Development, UAT, and Production environments. This setup enables thorough testing and validation before any changes are moved into production. However, the extensive configuration work involved in this, particularly for routing to agents and form updates, can be time-consuming and complex. Moving these configurations between environments is especially challenging due to the need to replicate changes twice per production environment.

One of the most significant impacts of using Salto in managing Zendesk was the ability to effectively utilize Zendesk’s sandbox environments. Previously, the overhead of manual updates made it impractical for the IS team to keep sandboxes in sync with production. As Susan Paolatto, senior information systems and architecture manager, explained, “We couldn’t avail ourselves of the Zendesk sandboxes because there was too much overhead. They would quickly get out of sync, and it wasn’t worth testing”. The team tended to make changes straight in production in non-working hours, quickly test in production, make tweaks and hope for the best.

Salto changed this dynamic, allowing the team to fully test and QA in a sandbox environment. Using Salto ensured that the environments were in sync, allowing the team to adapt processes and finally test in sandbox and automatically copy changes to the production environments. Not only that, onboarding new agents and training processes were improved: “We can actually put a user in UAT now, because it’s just like production. Before, we were making fake tickets in production and were not able to fully train our agents,” noted information systems engineer, Jennifer Vienna.

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Deployment and documentation automation

Before using Salto, the Next Insurance IS team managed all changes in production manually. This labor-intensive process involved copying and pasting configurations from sandbox environments into production. “With Zendesk, everything was manual. You’d have to make changes manually, which was very time-consuming. It could take hours to make changes, considering the numerous triggers, automations, fields, forms, and macros involved”, said Paolatto. Shlomi Shpilman, director of global information systems, explained, “we had a very bad experience. Sometimes you’re just forgetting to set up one of the fields or one of the configuration fields. And then it messed up all the processes in the system, causing a few days of post-go-live fixes and data fixes.”

Using Salto, the IS team transitioned 84% of their Zendesk releases to automatic processes, exceeding their target of 70%. Most of these are executed through Salto, greatly increasing team efficiency and release quality. Salto also simplified the preparation and execution of detailed documentation, reducing the hours spent on changes and ensuring consistency and accuracy. Without Salto, “we would just use Google Docs, said Vienna. “I would just write everything down, lay out the plan so that I had it in place so that when I did launch, everything was written out”. Salto streamlines this process by automatically documenting changes efficiently.

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"Where is this used?" in complex Zendesk configurations

Salto’s ability to perform impact analysis was a game-changer for the team. “Being able to search and pull in a tag, and it will show me not just where the tag is being used in macros, but also in triggers and automations, was super helpful,” said information systems engineer Ashley Vacek. Salto automatically surfaces all configuration elements that depend on a certain searched element, essentially showing you “where this is used”. This feature proved invaluable during one of the IS team’s bigger projects to simplify agent workflows by reducing six forms into one, requiring extensive unwinding of triggers and automations.

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Gaining confidence to change during working hours

Integrating Salto allowed the IS team to regain their nights and weekends. Previously, deployments often had to be performed during off-hours to avoid disrupting business operations, leading to long workdays and weekend tasks. “Salto gave us our nights and weekends back,” said Paolatto. “Because it's so quick now, we can deploy at a reasonable time during the day, instead of having to wait for night or the weekends. What could have taken hours at times, literally takes just a few minutes. And I think there's more confidence because I've tested it. So we can deploy at a reasonable time during the day”. The team can now deploy changes stress free during working hours, knowing no half-baked changes will accidentally find their way to production and cause errors for agents.

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More applications with Salto

Zendesk is not the only SaaS application that Next Insurance manages through Salto. The NetSuite team at Next Insurance also uses Salto to automate customizations and gain operational efficiency.