Customer Story Highlights

Founded in 1960, Guild is a nationally recognized independent mortgage lender with more than 250 branches and satellites serving home buyers throughout the United States. Prior to Zendesk, the company handled support requests via email, often involving large teams distributed across the US. It’s no surprise this process often resulted in severe bottlenecks and people unknowingly working on the same internal issue. “Knowledge was often siloed,” says Drew Gillett, Business Process Consultant, “and as a result, people ran into difficulties reporting on work that was done.” Something needed to be done—fast. Zendesk offered a viable solution—a way to improve customer relationships through better internal processes for customer engagement and better customer insights.

With Zendesk’s collaboration tools and reporting capabilities, the platform was an easy decision for Guild. Guild was eager to get Zendesk up and running as quickly and efficiently as possible. After researching and evaluating implementation partners, Guild valued Envoy’s prompt and thorough communication and chose the Envoy team for the job.

Envoy partnered closely with the Guild team to understand their specific needs and longer-term customer vision. Envoy then set to work on configuration and a number of customizations to support the vision. For example, Envoy enabled meaningful reporting on systems that prioritized development efforts across multiple systems.

In four months, Zendesk was up and running. “Now we’re blowing through tickets—upwards of 25,000 at this point,” announces Drew in delight. Reporting is now related to different ticketing aspects and broken out into different categories. For example in marketing — tickets can be related to design or automated systems. Tickets can be used to increase training in that area, create a webinar, etc. “It’s given management a valuable insight into how long before ‘first touch’, i.e. how long before someone is able to respond first.” In addition, reporting now shows how long it takes on average to solve someone’s problem.

“Envoy is a very responsive and communicative team and the consultants are top notch,” says Drew. “We have complicated terminology and processes. Envoy did a great job working with us to understand those processes so that Zendesk could be customized to our needs.”

As a result of a smoother ticketing process and increased collaboration, Guild was able to reduce response time while improving response quality. The visibility Zendesk and Envoy created is also key to keeping a pulse on the needs of its over 4100 employees nationwide. Supporting these needs creates a more efficient loan process for anyone purchasing or refinancing a home.

As Drew explains, Zendesk has been a critical tool in providing top-notch internal customer service. “It’s very exciting to use cutting-edge technology to get people quick response time when they need it,” says Drew. “In an industry where the needs of a loan change minute to minute and delays can mean thousands of dollars in differences to a borrower, this is essential. Envoy made it easy.”