Wyze Labs swaps Freshdesk for Zendesk to meet 10X growth

Wyze Labs was founded by three entrepreneurs who set out to make smart home technology smarter and more accessible at a great value. The team held true to that mission and launched the Wyze Cam in 2017, which was instantly dubbed “too good to be true” in a product review, based on its high quality and unbelievably low price.

The Washington-based company went on to build an impressive portfolio of smart cameras, home security systems, power and lighting solutions, health trackers, and lifestyle accessories, while earning accolades and being named one of Time magazine’s most influential companies of 2022.

CX is “a pillar of the company”

From day one, Wyze Labs has been very grounded with its customer base and aspired to “be friends with users.” That speaks to the team’s commitment to bring the Internet of Things (IoT) to the common person, build products that their friends and family can afford, and help every customer use the technology.

“Our support program is a pillar of the company, a true cornerstone,” shares Chuck Courtney, Wyze’s Support Manager. “Offering ‘too good to be true’ products at the price we do and providing the level of support that we do is something that I’ll be proud of forever.”

By 2018, Wyze had outgrown Freshdesk and started using the Zendesk Suite to power customer support through phone, email, knowledge base, and social channels. Support team Wizards provide live chat 7 days a week, and customers can use the Solvvy chatbot to self-serve.

Switching their CX solution was crucial in helping the team deliver customer-first support, while tackling high volume more efficiently. “This is a Zendesk success story, and we can attribute a lot of that success to the transition we made to the Zendesk platform,” adds Mr. Courtney.

Freshworks issues arise quickly

Wyze’s founders initially chose Freshworks for CX based on their experience using it at a previous company. It was easy to get up and running and create reports, allowing them to onboard new hires quickly. However, the user experience was not intuitive and became confusing when doing more complicated tasks.

Support agents needed multiple browser tabs open but couldn’t see the ticket numbers, and they had to constantly refresh the page to see updates. “For a company that really strives to have a high response rate within minutes, not being able to see customer replies quickly was always a struggle using Freshdesk,” says Mr. Courtney.

At the time, Wyze only had six or seven agents handling upwards of 300 calls per day. As the team expanded, the challenging interface began to slow down support operations.

Stable support is a key sales driver

In particular, Freshcaller was not keeping up with higher call volumes as the company grew, so the queue wasn’t showing up correctly and calls were getting missed.

“Voice was always at the core of our business, but we were dropping calls left and right,” Mr. Courtney recalls. “Stability is key for us, because dropped calls equal lost money, equal brand damage, equal lots of trickle effect there.”

More requests started popping up on social media, along with negative feedback which threatened the young company that relies on customer reviews.

Wyze went back and forth with Freshworks to work out the kinks, but eventually got no response. The unreliable CX, lack of tech support, and lost efficiencies were preventing business growth, which drove Wyze to find a more scalable solution.

Fast, seamless transition to Zendesk

Zendesk emerged as the best fit because of its massive user base and complete CX stack offering. Wyze moved everything over seamlessly in a matter of weeks.

“We had conversations around Salesforce and other competitors, but Zendesk had voice, chat, a solid community, tons of articles, and forums full of information,” Mr. Courtney says. “We were offered direct help for getting our systems set up right the way. Agent Workspace made it easy to transition.”

Scaling efficiently with unified CX

The team was revitalized after consolidating their support channels (voice, chat, social), case management, knowledge base, and analytics into Zendesk.

“I’ve used other platforms where you have to manage multiple systems to make sure they all work together,” says Bruce Wagner, Director of Support at Wyze. “The best part of Zendesk is having everything in one place, without having to worry.”

A unified, omnichannel CX solution helps the company continue scaling in cost-efficient ways. Wyze only needs one Zendesk admin now, instead of five admins for five different systems, which means lower operating costs. They also experience minimal downtime.

“We serve up to 70,000 tickets per month with a very small group of people, so having an easy-to-use platform is important,” notes Mr. Courtney. “Since moving to Zendesk, functionality became way more stable and we now answer 98 percent of our calls.”

Wyze also reports a 78 percent improvement in call acceptance and cut first call resolution time from one week to one hour.

Time-saving dashboards and reporting

Mr. Courtney remembers, “One of the biggest struggles we had was that Freshdesk did not provide great data or functionality. We were spending hours every week exporting raw data out of Freshdesk, importing it into Microsoft Excel, and building reports manually.”

Now, the support team can surface voice of the customer data and share insights with programmers, developers, product teams, and executives. “The data we get from Zendesk is presented in full detail in charts and real-time dashboards. When we need to deep dive, we use the Explore metrics,” adds Mr. Courtney.

Robust help center drives 10X growth

Thanks to a robust internal and external knowledge base, Wyze only receives 60,000 monthly tickets despite getting 2 million visitors to the site every month.

“An easy-to-build and easy-to-maintain help center allows us to deflect more customer requests,” explains Wagner. “Internally, it also helps our agents find answers quicker than going into Confluence, so it’s a more efficient process.”

Mr. Courtney appreciates learning from other users, too. “Zendesk has a very large community with a lot of articles and forum posts, so we’ve been able to overcome a lot of issues with a quick search. All of that equals money saved, time saved, and greater efficiencies.”

To date, Wyze has achieved a tenfold increase in business and 400 percent growth on the support team.

Future proofing with powerful integrations

Another perk of Zendesk’s large user base is that third-party solutions prioritize building integrations for the platform. “Most of the time, there’s already an integration for everything that we do pre-built into Zendesk,” says Wagner. “All we have to do is plug it in and go.”

Wyze already has integrations with Solvvy, Shopify, Recurly, Recharge, and Braze, and they hope to increase automation and functionality moving forward.

Once Tymeshift (now Zendesk WFM) became part of Zendesk, Wyze swapped out Assembled for workforce management. The team embraced the new look and feel of the Zendesk WFM platform, forecasting model, agent experience, and real-time reporting capabilities. And, they appreciate having a Zendesk CSM and dedicated Zendesk WFM advocacy team to help with technical issues and build a stronger roadmap together.

Innovative partnership and the future of AI

Looking ahead, Wyze has already seen productivity increase since giving agents access to OpenAI ChatGPT.

Wagner feels strongly that “the future is AI” and Zendesk is the right partner for the long term. “The great thing about Zendesk is that it’s such a common tool and so easy to build for,” he says. “We can go into the future knowing we won’t be left behind, because anyone building new tools and new functionality with AI is going to make sure it works with Zendesk.”

Mr. Courtney is also excited to keep evolving. “We’re going to continue to chase technology and integrate AI into our customer support program. As long as Zendesk continues to be an innovator, we will continue to choose Zendesk.”