Shiji Group Provides Enhanced Customer Experience with Zoho Desk

Overview

Shiji, the one-stop technology solution for businesses in hospitality, retail, food service, and entertainment, leverages Zoho Desk to provide seamless support to its customers.

About Shiji

Shiji began its exciting journey as the premier network system supplier in China. Since then, it has branched into hotel systems technology and become an outright software vendor.

Founded in 1998, Shiji is now a multinational hospitality industry leader, with further plans to expand throughout the global marketplace. Today, Shiji consists of over 5,000 employees and serves more than 91,000 hotels, 200,000 restaurants and 600,000 retail outlets in over 180 countries.

Around 56% of U.S. hotels, which is 37,000 hotels, use Shiji technology to provide an outstanding and modern experience to their customers. In Europe, Shiji serves 26,300 hotels, of which 51% are located in Paris and 52% in London. Shiji has also set its footprint in the APAC region to provide extraordinary support and service despite the difference in time zones.

The challenges of global expansion

In 2017, when Shiji wanted to extend its products and services beyond China, it looked to break away from the more restrictive customer service ticketing system that it was using for all its products as the system only supported a limited number of browsers and was not as scalable for global use.

In order to provide excellent support to all its clients across the globe, Shiji needed a ticketing system that would grow along with it and accommodate its future process needs. Shiji wanted this system to act as a reliable technology partner and support its journey at every step.

Shiji's evaluation process

Shiji considered all options on the market to find a newer and more modern technology solution. Zoho Desk was ultimately selected due to its usability and functionality with a reasonable price tag for products, implementation, and consulting.

A few reasons Shiji's decision makers were drawn to Zoho, include:

• The company had already implemented Zoho CRM to run everyday operations.
• The teams loved the support provided by Zoho Desk.
• The Zoho Desk team provided requested customizations that were not on the list of existing customization options.

After due consideration, Shiji joined hands with Zoho Desk which was up and running in less than 8 weeks. Shiji now has 600 Desk users, which will likely increase with its plans to extend Desk usage to China and Hong Kong.

How does Shiji Group leverage Zoho Desk?

With Zoho Desk, Shiji operates multiple support channels and portals for different products.

With Zoho Desk, Shiji benefits from:

• Automation

• Workflows

• Assignment rules

• Notifications

• Escalate

• Service level agreements

• Supervise

• A self-service portal for customers in the knowledge base

• Three different primary channels for email

• The multi-brand help center

• IVR

• Multi-department ticketing

• Email ticketing

Customization

The Zoho Desk team provided Shiji with the ability to associate one contact with multiple accounts. Though Zoho did not support this feature initially, the team developed it specifically for Shiji so that one corporate contact could open, view, and manage tickets across all their sites.

Additional Automations

Shiji has grown its business through multiple strategic acquisitions. This presented a few challenges, as the acquired offices were accustomed to different software and processes. To make the adjustment to Desk easier, Zoho created additional automations as requested to allow for further innovation.

Effective integrations

Zoho Desk has been integrated with Zoho CRM, Zoho Analytics, BeyondTrust, Jira, and Zoho Campaigns. Shiji Group uses Zoho Analytics to get more insights and data from customer tickets and provides quick responses from the support team using Zoho Desk.

Custom functions

Shiji offers its services and products to more than 90,000 hotels, which makes it difficult to identify the owners of each ticket. To steer clear of confusion, it has created a custom function in Zoho Desk which pulls the regional and service office information from the account record and assigns it to the ticket so the associated support person can easily identify customers.

Another custom function prevents tickets from being closed by anyone other than the ticket owner.

Performance review process

Shiji mobilizes Zoho Desk, even when conducting performance reviews outside of Zoho. Using metrics from the dashboard, including the number of tickets closed and time spent on each, Shiji creates scorecards for each employee. The reports in Zoho Desk then help it address any performance issues discovered through this process.