Centilytics, Globee Awards Startup of the Year, Uses Zoho Desk to Increase Customer Satisfaction Rate

The Company

With humble beginnings as a summer project in a Stanford dorm room, Centilytics has grown to become a 180-people strong organization. Focusing on their mantra of "he not busy being born is busy dying," they have constantly reinvented themselves. And today they are a Cloud Management Company that focuses on delivering end-to-end cloud management to its customers. Serving customers all over the world while handling over $750 million in public cloud consumption, Centilytics is on its way to reinvent itself -- yet again.  

The Challenge

The challenge faced by Centilytics was two-pronged: It had to sustain rapid growth, while reducing inefficiencies and redundant processes. Centilytics had mature processes in place from the time of its inception, and relied on service desk solutions from Microsoft and other providers. Kushagra Sahni, chief of staff at Centilytics, and his team were seeking a new solution with an advanced UI to make the learning process easier for the agents, and the adoption faster.

The Solution

Uniting similar visions

Sahni and the senior management's first exposure to Zoho Desk was through a simple video posted on Youtube about Desk’s development and goals. It was shot in Tenkasi, where the product was born, and it is grounded in the reality of helping people with their day-to-day business. And emphasized that good products do not exclusively come from Silicon Valley. World-class products can be made in India as well. The management was impressed with Zoho’s values and felt they aligned with Centilytics' vision. Centilytics also aims to deliver world-class quality with operations in India.

Comparing features and prioritizing results

When comparing Zoho Desk with other products on the market, Sahni was particularly pleased with Zoho's product catalog. He felt that a lot of features fit their business model and could accelerate their growth.

Centilytics started their transformative journey with Zoho Desk, and in November 2020, they added Zoho One to their business toolbox. The multi-DC setup of Zoho Desk eliminated the hassles of transferring data. “I also loved the tutorials on the webpage, which make it effortless to understand different features to make the purchase decision,” adds Sahni.

Real-time view of inter-departmental activities drives a process-driven cycle

The teams at Centilytics that use Desk include both customer-facing and internal departments. Customer grievances reach agents through the Centilytics support email account, which they manage through their own IP. An email integration with Desk helps them keep track of the issues and resolution progress.

There are different levels of support at Centilytics and they are categorized based on the severity of the issues. L1 is the customer-facing team, while L2 and L3 are senior levels, which look at more serious issues in detail. With Desk, teams can automatically route tickets to the appropriate department based on keywords in the ticket. This process can also be done manually to escalate tickets through levels of severity. Centilytics started managing close to 100 tickets per day using Desk. In total, they have resolved 33,590 tickets in just one department.

Centilytics segregates tickets by severity, using levels S1 to S4. Based on the level, the IT service manager and Team Leaders are notified through SMS.

Reducing resolution time using automations

Centilytics has made full use of automations and blueprints in Zoho Desk. Blueprint helps the teams stay on track and ensures discipline and consistency in their processes. Workflow automations help them segregate tickets and assign them to appropriate teams. They use a process of real-time hashtag monitoring, meaning that when a customer uses specific hashtags, an email parcel running behind the scenes routes the message to the appropriate team. All these processes work seamlessly through the power of automation.

Strengthening collaboration with integrations

Centilytics has integrated Desk with Twilio, a communication API, to ensure team members are notified of tickets and any other developments promptly via SMS. The Zoho Analytics integration provides important real-time business insights for making big-picture decisions. Sahni says, “Apart from the default dashboards, we have created multiple others, like SLA and agent performance dashboards.” This helps monitor occupancy levels and track the performance of all agents.

The integration between Zoho CRM and Desk is the backbone of the business, as the teams at Centilytics view data on both platforms when working with customers. Through this integration, they access contextual information to enrich customer relationships. The company has its own auto-ticket creation process in place, and the tickets are managed on both CRM and Desk simultaneously. Zoho Recruit and Social are also integrated with Desk. All solutions are carefully connected and calibrated by the team using Blueprint, so processes remain as structured as possible. AWS and Microsoft integrations also add momentum to their business as they use these platforms to handle many sales operations.

Radar making significant impact in performance monitoring

Radar by Zoho Desk is the mobile app that helps teams keep track of important insights on the go. It shows real-time stats of live traffic, customer happiness levels, and more. Sahni feels it is easy to adopt and access at anytime from anywhere.

Tracking important KPIs to augment growth

Apart from the usual service-level metrics available through Desk, management at Centilytics finds first-response time metrics beneficial. The number of tickets being solved combined with compliance percentage gives them insight into the team’s performance. This way, they can identify any areas needing improvement. They can also assess customer satisfaction and even tweak pricing. The hour-logging feature has helped Sahni immensely, enabling him to track how many hours are spent solving a given ticket so he can consider ways to optimize the process.

Driving quick adoption across the company

The team at Centilytics adopted Zoho two times faster than they had other solutions. Sahni feels this is because of Zoho's user-friendliness and an array of customization options.