mySugr delivers personalized diabetes expertise with Zendesk

Hundreds of millions of people around the world deal with the daily demands of diabetes, and their numbers continue to grow. Managing this chronic condition is difficult, but companies like mySugr, with its comprehensive diabetes management solutions including the beloved mySugr app, automated diabetes supply delivery and personalized coaching, “make diabetes suck less.”

Founded in Vienna, Austria, in 2012 and part of the Roche international healthcare family since 2017, mySugr is among the leading mobile diabetes platforms in the world. Available in 65 countries and 14 languages, mySugr helps more than 1,6 million users conveniently track and analyze their personal data at the tips of their fingers, learn more about diabetes, and get personalized advice from experts.

Living with type 1 diabetes herself, Anne Kainz realized the benefits of the mySugr app even before she joined the company as a customer support agent five years ago, using it to help lower her blood glucose levels significantly in just two months. Now, as a global customer support lead, Kainz heads a team of 8 agents charged with delivering personalized support and a top-notch customer experience while handling an average 32,000 tickets annually.

“Our customer experience is a big topic because our service is targeted to such specific audience,” Kainz said. “At mySugr, customer support means so much more than just getting those tickets out of the way. The whole team feels responsible for being knowledgeable about both our products and life with diabetes, in order to really provide value for our users.”

Two key elements help keep customers in the fold: agents’ intimate knowledge of diabetes supported by use of an integrated customer service solution. mySugr adopted Zendesk Support and Talk in 2012, which the company now uses proactively for product onboarding calls. “As a medical device company, the safety and security of our users are our number one priority,” Kainz said. “Zendesk, of course, was the right environment for that.”

mySugr subsequently added Zendesk Guide to provide customers with self-service options, leading to a 10 percent reduction in service tickets. “We thought it would make sense to have a digital help center for a digital product,” Kainz said. “The users and our business partners are happy that we share a lot of useful information in Guide and that it’s available in many languages.”

It then implemented Zendesk Chat in 2017, using Chat to help users sign up for the mySugr Bundle, which includes an automated test-strip subscription and personalized diabetes coaching, currently offered to German and U.S. customers. After seeing how Chat helped to quickly resolve customer issues and improve conversion rates, mySugr plans to expand its use. “Right now we’re only using the widget, but the intention is to create an even better chat experience for our products using Zendesk Chat,” Kainz explained.

She believes that expansion will go smoothly. “Every feature is easy to roll out in Zendesk,” Kainz said. “When we need more licenses, the contracts are prepared in a few hours. When it comes to technical issues, I can call Zendesk to solve really tricky issues in a few minutes or hours.”

mySugr’s integrated solution with Zendesk is bolstered by apps and integrations from the Zendesk Marketplace that lets the team tailor their instance just the way they need it. The User Data app provides a quick customer view from the ticket layout page, and the JIRA integration allows the team to create or link customer issues for the QA and engineering teams to investigate and resolve. They also use a Trello integration internally to customize macros for specific countries. Meanwhile, the company used Zendesk’s API to build a customized app that helps the support team unsubscribe customers from company newsletters and activate the next-level features of mySugr Pro.

mySugr also uses Zendesk to increase visibility and collaboration across teams. It has extended Zendesk licenses to members of the quality assurance and engineering teams as well as the company’s medical director, data privacy officer, and diabetes coaches. “As an ISO-certified medical device company, we have to document everything we do” Kainz said. “Zendesk helps us to detect recurring bugs or customer requests, and we can pinpoint our suggestions on how to constantly improve our products to the right people within the company.”

This detailed data helps the mySugr team resolve tickets and technical issues faster. “We have a lot of blood sugar meter integrations, and of course our customers use a large variety of smartphones. It’s much easier for us to troubleshoot when we know right from the start of a conversation which devices the user is using,” Kainz said. The cross-team effort ensures that 60 percent of tickets are resolved in a single touch—and usually in only a matter of hours.

The result is a CSAT score averaging 90 percent—well above the company’s goal of at least 80 percent—and increasingly personalized relationships that mySugr is working to develop with customers. mySugr sets up its workflows to ensure that agents who previously assisted a user will talk to them again, thus signaling to customers that they’re being helped by someone who has a personal stake in their care. The support team also monitors Facebook, Twitter, and blog comments for user feedback and to help identify service issues that must be resolved.

mySugr’s focus on providing stellar customer service extends to even the most unconventional of customer needs—for example, one user reached out about how he was using the app to manage his cat’s diabetes. “The user was in love with the app,” Kainz said, “so of course we got back to him and helped him resolve his quite unusual issues.”

The team gets the most satisfaction from transforming “grumpy” customers into happy ones, Kainz said. “We really try to take all the pain and bad feelings from the customer and tell them: We know it sucks, but we will find a solution together.”