“By partnering with Zendesk, Brainly more effectively serves its user base using industry best practices and an exceptional user experience on a scalable platform.”
Erik Lima Bezerra
CRM Operations Analyst at Brainly
“Without automation, I wouldn’t have time to dedicate to one customer. Now we have time to provide personalised support.”
Erik Lima Bezerra
CRM Operations Analyst at Brainly
HQ
Krakow, Poland
Founded
2009
Active users per day.
15m
47%
CSAT increase in 2024
32%
decrease in Ticket Volume (for US and Brazil markets)
41%
improvement Median First Reply Time YoY
26%
tickets deflected by Zendesk Answer Bot
Brainly
Knowledge is power
For a company like Brainly, knowledge is power. It describes itself as the AI Learning Companion. Millions of students, parents and teachers use the online platform to get help with their learning – be it for the answer to that mind-boggling geometry homework, an explanation on how the world’s tidal system is connected to the moon, or an in-depth explanation on complex theories for university students.
The platform supports 15 million daily users in 11 different languages – equating to trillions of questions being asked and answered by the Brainly community.
It would be impossible to run a company like Brainly without having that same thirst for knowledge within its own business systems, and since implementing Zendesk in 2015, the company’s support function has reached new levels of efficiency.
Despite having only a handful of customer service agents for millions of customers, Brainly has done more than merely improve its customer service offerings. With a significant reduction in ticket volume and first reply times, plus the provision of critical data utilized by the business as a whole, the Customer Support team is now the powerhouse of the company.
Lending a hand
CRM Operations Analyst at Brainly, Erik Lima Bezerra, has overseen the company’s use of the Zendesk Suite since joining in 2021. He’s worked closely with Zendesk to get the most out of Explore, Support, Guide and Chat, which are used to power email, messaging and online forms.
“‘Lending a hand’ is a fundamental value every Brainly employee embraces, but providing white-glove support to such a large, multilingual, diverse customer population is difficult for a small team,” says Bezerra. “By partnering with Zendesk, Brainly more effectively serves its user base using industry best practices and an exceptional user experience on a scalable platform.”
For instance, using triggers within the Zendesk inquiry form deflects tickets to the appropriate agent or department, while integrating tools such as the robotic process automation solution, Y Meadows, allows high-volume repetitive tasks to be dealt with efficiently.
“If a user requests a username change or account deletion, agents don’t even need to think. They just hit confirm – it’s about clearing all the repetitive stuff,” says Bezerra, pointing to how Zendesk’s Answer Bot also helps deflect commonly-asked questions, with the bot now addressing 26% of inquiries.
Plus-one touches
The focus for Brainly is to use automation as much as possible to free up the CX team for “plus-one touches”.
“These are personalised interactions where we can give that human touch,” explains Bezerra.
He shares an example when Brainly’s payment processor refunded a customer $20 by check. But in their home country of Brazil, checks are practically obsolete. The customer was very upset that he was struggling to receive his refund, but Bezerra had already sprung into action, finding a solution.
“I took the time to find the closest currency exchange to his home, rang the branch to confirm they would cash the check and shared the location with him, guaranteeing he could solve his problem there. Without automation I wouldn’t have time to dedicate to one customer. Now we can provide more personalised support,” says Bezerra.
Data sharing
Bezerra’s team is often the first to know if the company has an urgent, far-reaching problem that needs solving, such as downtime on the app or payment problems. “We’ll start receiving lots of tickets, and by using Zendesk tools, we can count the exact number and figure out if there’s something to tackle urgently.”
He adds: “Our goal is to share support team learnings across the company. We gather the data, assess volume, and gain an understanding of the things we have to work on. If we get three tickets a month on an issue, it’s understood we don’t have to work on that as urgently as something that’s raising 500 tickets a month, at which point teams will stop working on other things to prioritize that.”
Safety first
While the initial deployment of Zendesk focused on Customer Support, it has since expanded to the teams that monitor online community safety.
Prior to Zendesk, the user could contact Customer Support to report a problem with their account to get a ban lifted, which resulted in complicated communications between the two business functions. Now, moderators simply fill out a Zendesk form and a trigger automatically bans the account, and any communication between the banned user and Brainly bypasses Customer Support and goes straight to Safety.
“When Safety came to me asking for this functionality, I didn’t know how we’d do it, but working with Zendesk I learned we could deploy this trigger with no extra costs or tools.”
Win-win partnership
Bezerra calls the collaborative relationship with Zendesk a “win-win partnership” and advocates the benefits of being able to volunteer to test the Suite’s new features and capabilities. Being able to make requests is another plus. “We have bi-weekly meetings where we catch up and I give suggestions and requests from my wider team,” he says.
Brainly’s ‘lending a hand’ approach to knowledge sharing sees Bezerra’s suggestions coming full circle with the team benefitting from “continuous improvements” from Zendesk.
“It’s great to know what’s coming next in the pipeline,” he says. “There are so many things that have come along in the past year – every day there’s a new improvement and these upgrades have elevated the Brainly user experience. These offer a more refined solution that accounts for many elements of the customer support puzzle, which play a pivotal role in preventing ticket overlaps and streamlining the workflow for our agents, directly impacting customer satisfaction.”
