MYOB boosts self-service capabilities, automation, and scalability to its team with Zendesk

MYOB has been a trusted provider of business management solutions to Australian and New Zealand small and medium-sized businesses for more than 30 years, offering a digital platform for accounting, payroll, payments, lending, employee onboarding, CRM and more.

Just as MYOB supports its clients throughout their business journeys—from nascent startups to thriving enterprises—it looked to support its employees from their first day. “As a software development company, our most valuable asset is our workforce. We aim to ensure that employee support is provided in a straightforward and intuitive way,” shares Chris Sinclair, delivery manager at MYOB.

As MYOB scaled, its approach to employee experience also shifted. “We cannot deliver optimal support at scale with humans alone, and need to innovate as we grow. Our team is already delivering at a much higher capacity compared to peers in our industry,” notes Sinclair.

Enabling employee independence through self-service

MYOB decided to foster a sense of autonomy and self-reliance in its employee support strategy. When looking for a solution to support this goal, the Zendesk suite stood out due to the ease of implementation and a vision that resonated with MYOB.

As a first step, MYOB had multiple teams contribute towards a rich and informative content library on Zendesk. It consolidated articles from around 40 teams on various topics. “We encourage teams to maintain their content. It would be impractical to micro-manage a thousand articles. So we use Zendesk and APIs to automate the content quality workflows,” explains Sinclair. “For example, if someone gives a thumbs-down to an article, a ticket in Zendesk is automatically created to notify the stakeholder responsible for the content, so they can resolve the issue.”

Today, MYOB employees can easily locate relevant self-service content. If they still require support, they can complete a simple form to reach the right agent. “A year ago, an employee would come in and ask the internal support team for help on a product, and we would waste time trying to route that request to the right team,” shares Sinclair. “Now, each request is directed immediately to the right team, and each team is only asked about things that they can support. With our integrations, we can also create triggers that take Zendesk tickets and perform actions like summarizing the issue and drafting a response.” With a suite of Zendesk apps built by SweetHawk, support staff also get automatically generated task lists and a calendar to guide them in their daily work.

Delivering excellent service with less

With the relevant information at their fingertips, MYOB employees are empowered to solve issues themselves. “We’ve seen a decrease in the internal help desk backlog: there used to be 130 tickets in our backlog, and now it’s about 30,” Sinclair highlights. “While we decreased the human touchpoints, we maintained an average CSAT score of 90 percent, sometimes peaking at 98 percent. We have also doubled our self-service percentage, or the percentage of users who end up on our platform without submitting a ticket. Plus we have been able to exceed our service-level agreements.”

Another significant time factor for MYOB’s support team used to be onboarding new employees. Initially, the entire process was manual. “Onboarding could take 30 to 40 minutes per employee., Now it’s down to about 5 to 10 minutes. A fully automated process is the goal, but we have already saved hundreds of hours of work,” notes Sinclair.

Metrics like these are easier to track thanks to Zendesk Explore. “The dashboards give me a good baseline, and I have the flexibility to find anything I’m looking for,” Sinclair adds.

Embracing AI for future-proofing

With the aim to continue streamlining operations, MYOB has set its sights on innovation. “Our future focus is AI, improved content, and expanding our self-service capabilities.” The company aims to pave the way for employees to interact with diverse platforms using natural language, enabling them to swiftly access information via Zendesk. Sinclair and his team have already started an independent pilot project to test the hypothesis of enhanced employee experience. “The pilot data suggests a massive return on investment: for every dollar we’d invest, we’d be saving 54 in time. The future of Zendesk is in automated responses and case resolution,” he concludes.