GPRS Chose Zoho Desk for its seamless automation capabilities

Overview

GPRS uses Zoho Desk to gain insights into the number of daily support tickets raised, the source of each ticket, and the time to resolution. This data helps GPRS agents strategize and improve the customer experience further through Zoho Desk.

The Company

With over 20 years of experience in subsurface damage control, Ground Penetrating Radar Systems (GPRS) has undertaken 250,000 projects and achieved a 99.8% accuracy rating. GPRS has more than 300 project managers in 54 major metro areas, and is listed among INC's "500 Fastest Growing Company Under 10 Million." Its mission is to attain 100% accuracy in subsurface damage prevention.

With the help of technology, such as GPS, electromagnetic induction (EMI), and 3D laser scanning, GPRS provides various services to clients across the nation. These include Utility Locating, Video Pipe Inspection (VPI), Concrete Scanning, 3D Laser Scanning, Drone Imagery, Leak Detection, and Mapping and Modeling. GPRS' clients belong to a wide variety of industries, such as healthcare, education, surveying, and engineering. It also works with homeowners, contractors, environmentalists, and excavators.

The Challenge

GPRS had used the same ticketing system for nearly three years—but only the support team appeared to be leveraging its benefits. When GPRS decided to expand usage of the system throughout the company, it faced many obstacles and limitations. The compliance department, among others, faced difficulty performing their tasks, and the support team could not help them, as their ticketing system was rigid and uncooperative. 

That is when GPRS started to look for new, more resilient software. Some of the challenges it hoped to overcome included:  

• Overburdening a single email address, which received feedback and complaints for all departments.
• Emails failing when GPRS added more departments to the workflow. It had become difficult for established rules to direct emails to the appropriate departments.
• Distinguishing the terminology each department used to check the status of a ticket. This made it difficult for teams to navigate tickets, identify their statuses, and assign them.

Requirements

GPRS wanted a solution that would:

• Provide a robust ticketing system with the capacity to expand and accommodate all departments.
• Seamlessly integrate with existing applications and systems.
• Simplify the creation of complex workflows.
• Be easy to use and flexible.

The Solution

GPRS chose to implement Zoho Desk due to:

• Ease of Use:The system is user-friendly and easy to manage. Statuses and priorities can be customized. Customer satisfaction surveys, SSLs, and custom domains can be easily added. In just a few clicks, GPRS could manage agents, roles, and permissions.
• Notifications:Desk provides contact and agent notifications for all customer-facing departments.
• Automation: Desk provides the capability to stretch the automation.
• Integration: GPRS can take advantage of SSO by integrating Desk with Microsoft Teams. It can also push tickets into Zoho Desk from other platforms.
• Reporting: Desk facilitates the easy creation of new reports.
• Enterprise support: Desk offers premium support for Enterprise edition users.

Custom Functions

• GPRS has created an email address for each US state. The states have been categorized into six regions. For instance, if an email is sent to californiainfo@gprs.com, it goes to the "west coast" department. The custom field "state" is automatically filled with "California." This helps GPRS employees identify the source of the ticket.
• When a user selects a macro, which is linked to a custom function, an auto-reply is generated for the user to send.
• When a customer replies to a closed ticket, the ticket reopens for the appropriate department.
• Ticket contacts are notified of the changes to/progress of their ticket status.

Email process

GPRS has added 50 departments to the email flow, and every department has its own support and email address, so the company can provide effective support to all its clients.

Automation

With Desk, GPRS created a variety of workflows, auto assignments, direct assignments, round robin assignments, and more. The direct assignments workflow forwards tickets to specific support people based on a particular keyword in the ticket.

Customization

With built-in, customizable settings options for each department, GPRS teams save time by eliminating the need to create workflows to segregate actions for different departments. Besides, each department has its own layout rules and fields, supervised rules, and customer happiness surveys.

Each department has its own layout rules and fields, supervised rules, and customer happiness surveys.

Agent KPIs

Zoho Desk helps managers evaluate agents' performances. Each agent's KPIs are tracked within the platform through various reports and dashboard metrics.

Dashboard metrics

GPRS tracks the following metrics from the dashboard: ticket traffic, income rate, agents online, agents offline, most ticketed thread, and more. The metrics used for tracking vary between each department.

Zia: Zoho's AI-powered assistant

GPRS employees use Zia to track the time when they receive the most tickets, the types of tickets they receive, and the time they need to resolve specific issues.

Integration with Zoho Forms

Information from Zoho Forms (collected from customers through scheduled emails), is automatically populated in the customer service boxes using the integration between Zoho Forms and Zoho Desk.

Benefits and ROI

Within two months, GPRS had all its departments using Zoho Desk including compliance, accounts receivable, accounts payable, accounting, deliverables, equipment repair teams, facilities, graphic designing, information system, payroll, and customer service. The vast majority of users experienced a seamless transition to the system.