Optimized Customer Service migrating from ServiceNow to Jira Service Desk

Overview

Founded in 2009, The Trade Desk is a leading platform for ad buyers to bid on and purchase digital ads using automated technology. Based in Ventura, California, the company has 20 office locations and customers that span the globe.

The Trade Desk has become the fastest-growing demand-side platform in the industry by offering advertising agencies, aggregators and their advertisers best-in-class technology to manage display, social, mobile and video advertising campaigns. The Trade Desk provides a self-service platform for ad buyers, who deliberately pick from hundreds of billions of digital ad opportunities each day.

Within a few years, the Trade Desk was experiencing hypergrowth. But with its success came operational challenges, and the company was unable to scale its systems to match the extreme growth rate. Through iterative organizational growth – typical for a fast-growing company – The Trade Desk was challenged with disparate systems and support processes.

There was no single location to see the entire picture related to a support issue. The Trade Desk’s engineering, development, product management, client-facing and support teams were each using different systems to manage workflows. For example, one team was using Desk.com, another Pivotal, while a third team continued to use Excel.

The entire company relied on email as the primary communication channel across the various teams. Email related requests had no clear accountability or ownership, and it was not uncommon to see many team members addressed or copied on an issue with no primary issue owner. This lack of automation, efficiency or collaboration in workflows and business processes inhibited The Trade Desk’s ability to scale and provide great customer service.

Challenges

The Client Services Department is the primary point of contact with The Trade Desk’s advertising agency customers. Client Services reps are account managers and traders in the field who interact with customers, working with them side-by-side each day. For Client Services their issues were critical: slow workflows and process management could not keep up with growth.

Client Services was also siloed. It had no direct connectivity to the Engineering & Development team, which handles its technical issues. If a Client Services rep needed to escalate an issue, they had to send an email to an address at the Engineering team with no way to track the message. Emails were often missed or dropped.

“As we started to expand rapidly, the tools that we were using started to break down. It became a situation where we had account managers duplicating effort, working on the same issue, but not necessarily coordinating or collaborating well,” said West.

“Our customers were not realizing the customer service they were looking for. Worse yet, some of them were not getting the answers they needed at all. At that time, our average internal customer satisfaction rating was sub 60 percent, which is totally unacceptable for our organization.”

“It was also adding friction to the growth we were experiencing. In some cases our product management teams were not even in the loop on trends that were occurring that might affect our platform.”

The breakdown occurred in three areas: First, there was fragmentation between development teams that used one system, and one or more support teams that used a different platform to manage tickets or requests.

Second, there was no traceability. No system was in place to track the status of each request, or who was in charge to provide an authoritative and timely update to a request. This was exacerbated because customer service reps were logging customer requests into a ticketing system that had no integrated connection to the backend development environment, where the Development team was making relevant upgrades.

Third, there was no analytics system in place. The Trade Desk is a data-driven company that uses automated technology systems to help its clients buy and place ads. Without analytics supporting the company’s internal systems, they were unable to anticipate or predict change or demand that could affect future growth. The Trade Desk wanted to continue on the hypergrowth curve, but in order to do that, management needed a way to make informed decisions based on data.

Choosing Cprime

These three problems motivated The Trade Desk to look at new systems and platforms including Jira Service Management. Drew West’s Global Support team recommended JSM as a potential workflow platform for front-end teams. They also looked at tools that could align with Engineering & Development. Global Support tested a variety of solutions and chose JSM and Jira software to close the alignment and collaboration gap.

The Trade Desk looked for a consulting partner that understood the Jira platform and could conform JSM to their unique needs. In addition, they wanted a partner that could provide strategic direction, and deploy the platform quickly.

The Trade Desk selected Cprime because of its expertise with the Atlassian Jira platform, its long experience with helping technology teams collaborate and iterate quickly in an Agile environment, and its proven ability to launch in a short time frame.

Cprime demonstrated the ability of JSM to scale for complex IT service management operations in a four-week proof of concept. This included a detailed discovery phase, followed by rapid prototyping and a demonstration of results. At the end of the four weeks, the consensus at The Trade Desk was to select JSM as the platform for all future service management operations, and for Cprime to implement it.

Client Services Solution

Cprime deployed Jira, JSM and Confluence to manage all Support operations at The Trade Desk. JSM brings every participant in a request into a central tool, where they can work together on a single version of the request. This eliminates organizational and process fragmentation, and gives managers vision into each service agent’s workflow.

All case communications are handled through JSM. Support ticketing and product management systems are seamlessly integrated. The ability to track the lifecycle of each request, and linked or related issues, vastly improves productivity and work quality.

In addition, JSM automates data collection and analysis. It automatically reports status, volume, types of requests and other data. With automated data mining, The Trade Desk can evaluate the highest volume case types that come into all support delivery teams, and the average time it takes to resolve a case.

“We were seeing 300 of a certain type of request come through our process every month, and because we now have traceability and visibility, we were able to say, ‘What if we added a feature to our platform that made it unnecessary for that request to come in anymore? The user of our platform could do it themselves’,” said West.

“We basically eliminated a recurring 300 cases every month, that I estimate took 300 hours. What would you do if you had 300 hours of employee time that you could reinvest? That’s a big value we’ve gotten out of JSM.”

Additional Features

Cprime brought a strategy to The Trade Desk to deploy workflow templates as part of the Jira Service Management implementation, so that business processes can easily scale as the company continues to experience hypergrowth. Cprime created a variety of JSM workflow templates for The Trade Desk to deploy whenever a new department is ready to migrate to the Jira platform.

The Development team can assess a team’s business needs and processes, look at what they’re currently using as a workflow, and choose the appropriate template for them. The deployment usually takes only a week when a department uses a workflow template that doesn’t need to be conformed.

Outcome

Cprime helped The Trade Desk build a connected service delivery team of over 150 service agents, and all 500+ employees are now active JSM participants. “Through rapid collaborative delivery, Cprime transformed our implementation into an enterprise platform that is continually being adopted and expanded today,” said Drew West.

“The rapid adoption and ongoing expansion of the Jira Service Management system has enabled us to establish consistent process standards and high quality of service, and to expand our efficiency and productivity.”

Interested in seeing similar results in your organization? Explore our flexible Jira Service Management solutions.

About Cprime

Cprime is an industry-leading, full-service global consulting firm with a focus on providing integrated and innovative solutions around digital transformation, product, cloud, and technology. With over 20 years’ experience, we provide strategic and technical expertise to businesses across more than 50 industries. Our team of advisors and technical experts have the know-how to meet organizations where they are to develop actionable solutions and solve business challenges. We also collaborate with our expansive network of partners to design, deploy, and harmonize technology stacks across organizations. Our mission is to empower visionary business leaders and teams to reimagine the future of work to achieve better outcomes.