How Flagship Credit Acceptance optimized processes and extended Zendesk’s functionality.

Flagship Credit Acceptance is an auto loan lender for customers with non-prime credit. With around 1000 internal customers, the organization generates between 2000-2500 tickets monthly, has an IT support team of 9 agents and uses around 80 full Zendesk agents in total.

Jonathan Neumark, Assistant VP of Technology Services, oversees the helpdesk and desktop support, along with change, incident and asset management. Jim Collins, Manager of Technical Support, is the primary Zendesk administrator and manages the support team. We spoke with Jonathan and Jim about why they started using SweetHawk apps, and the positive impacts these have had on the company.

Before SweetHawk was introduced, Zendesk was already utilized at Flagship. Although it was working well for the organization and met many of its needs, it had some limitations and required enhancements to cope with an increased workload and audit requirements. Jonathan explains “we knew we would have not only tremendous growth in staffing, which would therefore drive up our incidents, but we also needed to adhere to very strict compliance, being a regulated industry.”

Without the ability to do approvals, approval routing or workflow routing in Zendesk, Jonathan was eager to find a solution. “I stumbled upon SweetHawk Approvals, which we found particularly useful for purchasing workflows - ensuring our accounting department had the correct information in every ticket. Then whenever we ran into what we saw as a limitation in Zendesk, we would ask ourselves, does SweetHawk have a product that could help us? And it sure did.”

Jim adds “another issue we ran into with Zendesk was the onboarding and offboarding of associates. The SweetHawk Tasks app allowed us to build a workflow and automation around new hires and terminations, which has made things a lot more structured for the team.”

After starting with Approvals, Flagship now utilizes the full range of apps from SweetHawk. Jonathan notes “we realised there were other things that we wanted to automate. We wanted to relieve pressure on our internal team from remembering items as they solved incidents and task tickets. So we purchased the Tasks app which allowed us to generate automatic checklists within tickets.”

Recurring Tickets is instrumental to the organization’s management of compliance tasks. Jim explains “for general audit tasks, patching of servers and updating of windows devices, we use Recurring Tickets to generate tickets on a regular schedule. This means teams within our organization keep control of maintenance tasks, and it also creates a nice audit record so we can adhere to all the compliance rules in our industry.”

The implementation of SweetHawk apps has seen numerous positive returns for the company. Jonathan explains a big one was the ability to continue utilizing their Zendesk investment, even with the limitations it had for our use case. “Switching to another service desk product would have been a momentous task, it's time-consuming, it's expensive to implement, and the return can take many years. SweetHawk Apps kept us on a familiar platform and enhanced the life of our already established Zendesk applications.”

For Jim and his team, one of the main benefits is that associates have more time to get things done. As well as this, “with recurring tickets, with calendar app, with tasks app, we’re also finding that we’re not missing items anymore. So that’s huge because in the IT industry, if one thing is missed it’s going to create a massive amount of work afterwards.”

When commenting on the quality of support from SweetHawk, Jonathan explains “they’re in a completely different country and timezone, but we’d send a message in the evening and in the morning there would be an answer with exactly what we asked for. If follow-up is needed, they are always ready to jump on the phone or a video call. We haven't found any bugs in the product, and the support we receive from SweetHawk is incredible, they are willing to listen to us and help us build the automation we want.” 

For those looking to try SweetHawk apps, Jonathan has the following advice: “If you're a Zendesk user and struggling with its limitations, SweetHawk’s quick little videos on their own website are fantastic to give you an insight as to what to expect. You can always reach out to the team for more advice or recommendations.”