Qumu + Zendesk: Award-winning teamwork retains 90%+ of customers

Each and every day, Qumu works on giving the world’s largest enterprises a more reliable and secure video platform. Live and on-demand video helps their customers drive employee engagement and distribute knowledge more efficiently, whether it be for an executive webcast, employee education, or the like.

“Our Global 2000 customer base demands that support be a significant differentiator, and our Customer Success team is a key contributor to Qumu’s 90%+ annual retention rates,” said Eric Rudolf, VP of Marketing at Qumu.

The Minneapolis-based company understands the difficulty and importance of streamlining communication internally, but also externally. Their own journey to create a seamless customer experience for their external customers has not always been a smooth road.

“Before Zendesk, Qumu went from really disappointing customers to now winning the Gold Stevie Award for Best Customer Support Department of the Year for 2020, and being named a 2020 ICMI finalist for the Best Customer Support Department of the Year in our category,” says Chad Sears, Qumu’s Vice President of Customer Success.

Fixing a broken customer support team

Scott Gilbert, now the Senior Director of Global Customer Support at Qumu, reflected back on his first task to “fix” the customer support team. After observation, he saw that his support team’s time was spent as notetakers and transcribers rather than problem-solvers for customers.

“You can’t effectively survive selling to and supporting Enterprise clients without a high level of organization and account visibility. And in 2014, we had neither of those,” explained Gilbert.

Leadership at Qumu found their previous solution was complex with limited reporting functionality. Limited analytics made it nearly impossible to build a data-driven CX strategy and challenging to understand areas for improvement and growth.

Without the ability to prioritize customer requests, the Qumu’s support team had no way to prioritize top-tier customers and hone in on new opportunities. Sears explains, “Our team couldn’t prioritize customers with higher investment versus one-and-one tickets.”

In 2014, leadership began to re-evaluate their support tools, and decidedly turned to Zendesk to help them build a best-in-class support team.

Scaling support seamlessly

With Zendesk in place, Qumu was now hyper-focused on making their customers successful and using metrics to track their progress. Qumu was able to deploy Zendesk Support and Guide in a swift 2 months, from start to finish. They’ve since added Chat and Explore as well.

Using Zendesk Guide, they were able to invest in what is now a robust help center. Initially the team started out with 170 articles across all products. Over the last five years, they were able to add over 200 videos alone, plus thousands of articles. Their knowledge base empowers their customers to find the answers they’re looking for, while alleviating their agents from answering repetitive tickets.

In addition to helping their agents work smarter, Qumu used Zendesk to improve client interactions. With built-in customer satisfaction surveys, Qumu tracks how well their agents are performing on a ticket as well as overall customer satisfaction from the greater org.

By consistently tracking their CSAT, they are able to maintain their low churn rates and keep their clients happy. Today, Qumu considers a 94% CSAT a fail internally. In fact, Qumu now boasts a 98%-100% CSAT score.

“We were able to make the Qumu support team a competitive advantage, and we know for sure this wouldn’t have been possible if we had stayed with the previous solution,” says Sears.

Building a best-in-class support team

Understanding what makes a great performer and rewarding them is crucial to the success of Qumu’s support team.

By using Zendesk Explore, Qumu has direct insight on all customer support interactions. With robust data pulled in from social, email, and chat, Qumu’s leadership team can better understand the strengths and weaknesses within their CX organization and how to address them.

“With Zendesk I have clear visibility to all of our key Customer Success statistics, and I’m able to continually adjust our strategy. These insights help our team focus on core activities like emphasizing our vision and mission, while empowering the team without micromanaging them,” Gilbert disclosed.

With Explore, Qumu also benchmarks overall team performance and takes stock of operational metrics. They then use this data to reward top performers and address any issues that may arise.

By using a data-driven approach, Qumu is able to maintain its excellence and its reputation as a best-in-class support team.

Agility during a “new normal”

Qumu’s web traffic was up 100% week over week almost immediately after the WHO declared a global emergency on January 30, 2020 due to COVID-19. With existing customers looking to increase their video capacity with added use-cases, the Qumu support team is busy to say the least.

“Navigating an influx of tickets during this time has been crucial to help our customers and our business during this time,” Gilbert said. “Despite a massive increase in support demands for the company’s platform, customer satisfaction metrics and renewal rates are still at all-time highs.”

With Zendesk, Qumu is able to adjust to new volatile support needs. By adapting their support operations, Qumu provides the best customer experience to their customers and prospects.

“At Qumu we solve the toughest and most diverse issues related to video use within the enterprise,” said Sears. “I am extremely proud of our Customer Success team and their contribution to that mission.”