The Scenario
X-celerate uses Zendesk for customer support and Microsoft TFS for requirements, development, and quality management. With a complex product offering and a growing customer base, X-celerate needed a way to integrate the two systems.
The Business Problem
With Zendesk and TFS configured as standalone systems, every support ticket and every developer update had to be entered twice, once into each system. This inflicted a substantial penalty on the team’s productivity, increased the probability of errors and omissions through manual processes, and left customers hanging with respect to status updates on tickets.
X-celerate’s Development Manager Kristina Larsen needed a solution that would eliminate the double-entry process and its consequent problems. Migrating the support desk to TFS would have lost the best-in-class capabilities of Zendesk — so Larsen went looking for a solution that would leave both existing systems in place.
The OpsHub Solution
The OpsHub Integration Manager (OIM) provides fault-tolerant, high-performance integration between Zendesk and Team Foundation Server (as well as many other systems and tools).
“Sometimes we used to have to spend a whole day making sure a particular set of items was synched between the two systems,” Kristina says.
“Now we can look once, in either place, and know that we are seeing the most current information. Developers know which items are the top priorities, and we can give customers instant status updates”.
Outcomes
OpsHub Integration Manager delivers real-time bidirectional sync between tickets in Zendesk and defects and requirements in TFS. Zendesk tickets can also be assigned directly to projects in TFS. The need for lengthy email exchanges on ticket priority and status have been eliminated by OIM’s synchronization capabilities, and an item’s priority in the queue is always matches from system to system.
Benefits
“We have recaptured 15-20% of our developer productivity,” says Kristina. “The developers always have clarity on which items are top priority, and we can give customers real-time status updates on the spot.
With OpsHub, everyone is much more relaxed, and we can resolve more issues faster.”