Customers’ expectations of goods and service providers are growing higher and higher. These expectations are exponentially higher in the luxury-end of any category. This means that an error in Zendesk carries a lot of weight. 

One luxury service provider aimed to roll out a new Zendesk instance to each region. The vast majority of the configuration - triggers, automations, macros, and other elements - weren’t meant to be varied between instances. But the only approach available to them for creating replicas of a Zendesk instance was rebuilding everything manually. That meant each time the admin created a new region, they’d rebuild the same 50 triggers (and many other elements). At this rate, with the required level of caution, launching each region was taking roughly four months. In fact, most of the admin’s time was spent on testing, pushing, checking, revalidating and aligning environments. 

The team was using three Zendesk sandboxes to avoid deploying configurations that contained errors—but this extra step created a significant amount of additional work to keep all sandboxes in sync. The team had to maintain a “highly documented and regimented” process to build and test in a sandbox, then rebuild and retest that same configuration in the live environment. 

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Templatizing Zendesk Rollouts and reducing countless hours of manual, error-prone work

Moving away from manually creating one instance after another was a must have for this service provider. The time saved meant months of work gained back. The team made a decision to find a way to templatize the configuration and copy it for as many divisions as needed so that each division has its own set of Triggers, Automations, and other customizations. In Salto, the Zendesk team found a way to take a standard set of configs, copy them, make a few small changes, and then deploy the new configurations to a shared instance without affecting the operation of other divisions.

Salto enabled this service provider to align all sandboxes with the production environment very quickly, and now the team can build in sandbox, test changes, roll them back, store versions and understand implications of proposed changes before launching them to their production instances. 

Salto addressed the team’s full wish list: 

• Environment sync
  With all environments fetched in Salto, the team can align sandboxes with production and copy configurations from one instance to another in a few clicks.
• Version control and rollbacks
  Because all changes are stored in Git, the company can maintain a detailed Zendesk version history and revert to a prior configuration to undo a change.
• Configuration templates
  The team now has configuration templates for regional divisions which reduce unnecessary work and the potential for manual errors.‍
• Reduced risk
  ‍Because the team can more thoroughly test configurations in a sandbox and push them into production, there is less risk of making mistakes in the live environment.
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With Salto, the team is much more agile and can debug Zendesk issues quickly. If there's a problem with an unusual field showing up on views, they can quickly check in Salto where the field is being used and isolate the problem—not waste time scanning a long out-of-date spreadsheet like they used to. In the words of the company’s IT Project Manager notes: “Before Salto, the process was click-heavy and painful. Salto’s interface presents Zendesk configurations in a readable format that makes it much easier to understand everything. Something that used to take us weeks before Salto now takes a couple of days.”

Even with resource constraints the Zendesk team is able to maintain the pace of planning, testing and launching new regions. Additionally, customer experience issues that stem from making changes in the live Zendesk instance no longer exist.