Case Study: Catapult Sports boost efficiencies

Catapult Sports needed to expand its support capabilities to meet its global customer base requirements which extended across multiple areas and covered various product lines.

Thomas Powers, VP of product support, explained to Digital Nation how the sports science company implemented a new platform leading to a variety of benefits, including an improved customer experience.

“It was 2016 and Catapult Sports acquired XOS Digital and PlayerTrek. During that transition period, we were looking to scale a bit with our support and looked at what was the best ticketing platform for us as a business.

“Some of the requirements we had what we were going to support global customer base, so we had three different regions support teams, multiple different product lines,” Powers said.

He said at the time there were “a different set of technicians that were supporting different products.”

“We needed to be able to group technicians. One requirement that we had, was to be able to survey our customers and track customer satisfaction.

He said it was also important for the company to utilise "the most cost-efficient platform as well.”

Powers said after looking at “multiple different platforms” the business landed on Zendesk, particularly around its customisation capabilities.

According to Powers, the business moved to a new platform “fairly quickly” with the company rolling the platform out in 2018 across four weeks.

“Luckily, we were at a position, where because we had segmentation in the past, like with our different databases, we were starting fresh.

“We spent our time looking to the future and making sure that we were setting it up so that we could make sure that we had the most efficient forms,” he said.

Catapult Sports has continued to “fine tune and add new implementation to our system” plus is still “finding ways to create new triggers and do some awesome stuff with Zendesk”.

Powers explained Catapult Sports has boosted its efficiencies since the change.

“We've seen the biggest impact in our efficiencies. We use our help centre from Zendesk as well, so we have a lot of articles and videos available for customers and for our agents and just interacting quickly through the ticketing platform using our help centre has been helpful,” Powers said.

“We integrate directly with our engineers using a different platform, which is Jira, So there's a lot of integrations available.

“We're all integrated with our logistics team where we can submit tickets and ship out devices when needed,” Powers said.
He added agents from the company have reacted positively to the new platform.

“Immediately, we've gotten the feedback from staff who work tickets day in and day out. Their life's a lot easier than what it was before previously,

“The best piece of it is, is it allows us to get that customer satisfaction and the survey results and publicise it. It allows us to see what we're doing well.”

He added the company are early adopter of advanced AI, something the team will continue to explore.

“I'm excited about the next 12 months. We are early adapters to advanced AI. There are a few features that have been useful for example, we have some of the ‘tone shift’ feature that have been put in Zendesk.

“We have some very technical people on our staff who are like our higher level three and level four technicians, they basically can take everything they're trying to explain to a customer and then with a click of a button, make it more friendly or make it more formal.

“There's ‘summarised’ features where there are times where some of our more complex tickets have a lot of back and forth between customers [and it] allows us to click a button and you get a summary of what just happened in the past week or so.

Powers said the team have experimented “more with the intent features”, which detects the intent from a customer “right before our agents start working with them.”

This feature could see the priority of the ticket placed into different groups of technicians.

“It's making us more efficient. We just signed up for a longer extension just to get to make sure that we're continuing to use these tools every day, which is awesome,” Powers concluded.