How Answers enables Viber to meet a 20 minute SLA while handling over 3,500 tickets a day
OVERVIEW: With 3,500 incoming tickets a day, keeping support operations streamlined is no small challenge. That’s why Viber’s support department needed a system capable of automating many of its day-to-day flows, removing time-intensive manual actions that would require hiring more agents.
FOUNDED: 2010
PARTNERS WITH WIX ANSWERS SINCE: 2019
NUMBER OF USERS: 1 Billion
OFFICES: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Brest, Kiev, London, Manila, Minsk, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Sofia, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 450
PRODUCTS USED
Knowledge Base
Help Widget
Insights
Ticketing
“It’s so easy to communicate — there’s always the willingness to help and get things resolved. If something doesn’t exist out of the box, Answers puts in a lot of work to find a solution or make it happen for us.”
Yael Harel
Customer support lead at Viber
The Challenges.
Viber needed a support solution that would allow them to:
Create multiple actions with minimal effort, so that 19 agents can manually answer 3,500 tickets a day
Have the capabilities to automate flows for thousands of tickets that don’t require manual replies
A customizable help center that's exactly in line with Vibers main website, can be updated easily with new content and creates an intuitive user experience, without confusion
Manage and translate articles in their help center, in multiple languages, without needing help from other departments
Fast onboarding for agents with minimal effort
Viber was looking for a new support solution that would give them the capability to answer thousands of tickets a day with 19 agents.
The huge volume makes it impossible to answer each ticket individually without hiring a lot more agents. At the same time, Viber was searching for a company that's exceptionally responsive - where partnership and communication are core values.
The Impact.
Viber needed an intuitive platform that would make their support team’s day to day more efficient and streamlined, removing the need to expand the department.
“One of the biggest things I look at is Views — to understand if we’re meeting our goals and open issues. When looking at specific dates and views, these can be manipulated easily, something I previously needed to do manually. So that’s been a huge time saver for me.” - Yael Harel, Customer Support Lead at Viber.
01. Smart macros and views enable flexible, streamlined workflows
The most significant value Answers offered Viber was to enable greater productivity and efficiency in a challenging support environment with thousands of incoming tickets per day. Macros are an essential ingredient for achieving this success in that they allow quick, accurate replies. The result is that 19 agents can manually answer 3500 tickets per day with a 20-minute or less first response time.
Macros are customizable shortcuts that apply a set of actions to a ticket with just one step. Viber uses them to create replies with article content, internal notes, to set priority levels, add tickets to specific labels, and more. When a new feature is released or improved, a macro is created or updated. This lets Viber speed up and simplify tasks on tickets. Agents can more easily answer incoming tickets with just a few clicks, without needing to spend too much time on each ticket.
For Yael Harel, Viber’s Team Lead for Customer Solutions, Views are crucial to every-day workflows. Viber categorizes assigned tickets automatically into multiple views. While agents only see 3-4 views, managers have the full overview which enables them to easily track KPIs and make adjustments to workloads. This is something Viber needed urgently since views and groups previously could not be organized freely.
Viber help center
02. Elevated customer satisfaction through automated flows
“Our main challenge is that we’re a small team with a high volume of users, so we were looking for a very flexible system that accommodates those needs.” Moty Rokach, Senior Director, Customer Service & Operations at Viber
Creating automatic flows for tickets that don't actually need to be handled by an agent was a must for Viber. This allows thousands of tickets a day to be streamlined because they are automatically closed or dealt with by being sorted into specific groups. Due to the nature of their business, many incoming tickets are customers reporting groups, content and ads, for which agent replies aren’t necessary. There are also GDPR-related tickets opened via a unique contact form with dynamic fields. All of these cases need to be handled automatically via an API. This avoids having agents tackle huge waves of tickets manually everyday.
This is why Moty was looking for a system that “easily communicates between the platform and the actual website.” Previously, these entities were not well connected. Answers provided the crucial strong connection between Viber’s website and support platform.
A good use case for the importance of this connection opening an account. Users need an activation code which is generated by an automatic action that sends a code and then closes the ticket. On top of that, with specific keywords the system recognises spam tickets and closes them.
To save time and ensure that tickets aren’t missed, they are automatically tagged and added to the right groups, allowing later analysis.
Yael drives home how essential this feature is, “Through the unique contact forms’ dynamic fields, when you select one thing it opens new fields according to that specification. Answers moves the ticket to the correct queue without the need for dev involvement which is absolutely necessary for us, otherwise we’d be completely overwhelmed with tickets.”
03. Communication that reflects partnership
For Yael, a strong partnership with their support provider is a top priority. It allows them to easily communicate their needs in order to quickly solve problems.
“It’s so easy — we just communicate directly through Viber if something’s up and we always get a quick answer, and there’s always the willingness to help and get something resolved. You’re not waiting a week to get an answer to a simple email. A good example would be that we needed a unique contact form that would allow different use cases, including triggering automatic actions so that agents don’t need to take care of all tickets manually. That didn't exist out of the box and Answers put in a lot of work to make that happen for us.” - Yael Harel, Customer Support Lead at Viber.
For Moty Rokach, there was instant confidence after “Answers actually showed a level of flexibility in their onboarding teams and systems that we couldn't find elsewhere, creating features we needed before the contract was even signed. The onboarding in the end was uncomplicated and didn’t need to involve tons of people.”
04. Easy onboarding and a system that makes the support department independant
Yael viewed moving to a solution with an intuitive, easy-to-learn UI as a high priority. It was important to not change the day to day for agents too much and make it easy for them to get used to the new system.
For Moty, the biggest advantage was having everything agents need inside tickets. Now, they no longer need to switch systems to find user details, history or any other customer data. “Usually when there’s a major change there would be an expected drop in KPIs, but because the change was so smooth and the new UI completely intuitive, it stayed completely stable — a big surprise to us and a huge win,” said Moty.
A big part of Viber’s decision to move to Answers was the intuitive UI of the content manager when creating and updating articles and how-to’s. A big concern was to find a solution that would allow the Support department to become independent from the Marketing department when it came to creating and updating content. The necessity being a solution with a strong connection between the knowledge base and support platform.
“When I had to decide whether to hire another support agent or a technical content writer, once we chose Answers I knew I could hire a writer because we didn’t need to hire more agents, and hiring our own content manager that could handle the system by themselves was really a dream for me — something that’s actually possible with Answers’ platform,” said Yael.
When the time came to onboard, the process for the entire department was very fast. On the day their new solution went live, agents were already able to answer tickets after only 3 hours of onboarding training.
“In my experience after using a lot of different systems to train agents over the years, needing just 3 hours was very unusual and wasn’t something I experienced before. The system is very intuitive, super easy to learn and most of the training wasn’t how to use it but what to look at, like macros and which groups to use,” said Yael.
Moty Rokach, Senior Director, Customer Service & Operations at Viber points out that “other systems we looked at weren’t as intuitive, didn’t have the same level of communication and wouldn’t have been as smooth to transfer to.”
What’s Next?
Moving forward, Viber has recently added a support specific content manager to their team to update their knowledge base content and how to’s, so that articles can be used by agents for replies and onboarding. The main goal for the coming year is to expand content within the knowledge base and create much more content to make it a go-to source for product information. They will also keep using the data Answers provides to optimize their support operations.
