Peek ditches spreadsheets and adopts Zendesk WFM

A Zendesk WFM (formerly Tymeshift) Testimonial
by Erik Jansen, Support Team Supervisor, Peek

Peek is the online booking platform system for tours and activities. Our users cover everything from travel operators, business owners for kayak rentals, people that do dinner shows, helicopter tours – you name it. We cover 42 different verticals.

I think we have a world-class support team, especially in customer service. We actually won a golden Stevie award in 2020 for having the best developed support team for 2020, which was awesome.

But when I came over, 5 years ago, all of our WFM (workforce management) was done just on spreadsheets. It was so disorganized. It took so long and nothing was predicting anything for us. It was just a hassle. I hated doing WFM – it was just so tedious and all these spreadsheets!

The way we were doing things would take at least a good four to five hours of me just pulling numbers from different places and plugging them into a spreadsheet, hoping that the formulas would calculate right. Whereas with Zendesk WFM (formerly Tymeshift), it’s like five minutes!

I pull up the time, what I need it for, and hit run. And then I can see solved items per hour, working time, or any other information… I just click the filter dialog. It has saved me so much time every single week when I have to report my KPIs to my executive team and staff and being able to just see how these people are rocking.

I used to do about 15 hours of WFM. I think that I really got it down to maybe an hour a day with Zendesk WFM.

Zendesk WFM also helped us become better staffed. Previously, we were guessing almost, based on some of the numbers that we had. But now we have specific numbers and Zendesk WFM helped us figure out exactly the head count that we need for each part of the seasons that we go through. So I think that is probably the most concrete thing that it has changed in our organization: providing us with the visibility to make sure we have the appropriate head count.

Not only that, we try to think of ourselves as a high-performing sports team. And so we want to have visibility for everybody: we want to make sure that we can hold each other accountable and make sure that we’re helping out where we can. And Zendesk WFM helps us see problems: if somebody’s stuck on a phone call for three hours, I want someone else to be able to see that and reach out to them and give them their support.

One of the other things that I really like is the scoreboards that everybody has access to, and they can see where they are and where everybody else is. It brought this fun challenge element to work. If this person has been on the top for the last three days – “how do I beat them?”

I’m definitely like that. I love a friendly competition.

My advice would be stop looking: get Zendesk WFM. It’s going to save you time. It’s going to save you money. It’s just going to blow you away.

Zendesk WFM has blown us away and I’m super pumped to have it. Just download it and get a deal because they are a great company. They work hard to provide you with the tools that you need as a support manager and the visibility, because that’s super important for all of us.

And it’s a breath of fresh air: it was so nice and so easy to go from spreadsheets to Zendesk WFM.