How GDPR Compliance helped Ascensos solve Zendesk storage challenges

When Zendesk introduced storage limits, many companies found themselves facing unexpected costs and compliance challenges. In this success story, we spoke with Andrew Underwood, Digital Transformation Manager at Ascensos, to learn how the GDPR Compliance app helped their clients regain control over their Zendesk storage and stay aligned with data retention policies.

Could you quickly introduce yourself and your company?

So, I’m Andrew Underwood. I work for a PPO called the Ascensos. I’m a digital transformation manager at Ascensos. As part of our client offering, we have a lot of our clients that use Zendesk for their ticketing, mostly within the customer experience industry, retail, and food as well.

How many companies are you covering at the moment?

We’ve got seven at the minute where we look after their Zendesk instance. And we’ve got a couple of clients that have got a Zendesk, but they look after it themselves (two or three). And then we’ve got quite a few customers that use Salesforce or different types of ticketing systems.

What was the biggest challenge your clients were facing before using GDPR Compliance?

It was mostly driven by Zendesk implementing their storage charges, maybe a year and a half to two years ago. They implemented storage charges and wanted to charge customers quite heavily for any instances that were over that limit. And that’s based on headcount licenses. So, for each Zendesk license, you get 10 GBs worth of storage.

But obviously, because there were no restrictions in place before, we had clients who, as soon as those were in place, were already over that limit. We also had clients that was getting close to that limit as well. And obviously, the Zendesk storage costs are quite high, so clients were keen not to pay those.

And I think what it did is also raise awareness of data retention policies that potentially weren’t in place for some clients that should have been. So, we’ve been able to have a chat with the clients and say, ‘What’s your data retention storage? Data retention policies? Let’s get your Zendesk instance to match those. And that will also help with the storage situation as well.’

We had some clients for whom we had to put a proposal for the Zendesk, actually showing how much the Zendesk storage would cost over the years. Because obviously that would just build up and build up if they did no deletion. And then offset against that is the cost of the GDPR app for an annual or monthly subscription.

How did you come across our application?

I just found it on the marketplace. I did a little bit of a search on there and found two or three different ones that did a similar sort of thing. I had a chat with each and found the extra functionality that the GDPR app gives you, around being able to be a bit more granular in what you delete.

We’ve got clients that want to keep certain classified tickets for longer than they would non-important tickets. So, especially in the food industry, if there’s been a sort of injury in store or something like that, they need to keep those for a real extended amount of time, whereas something like getting a refund or whatever can be deleted much sooner. So, that was useful; that this extra feature was in there.

And we also had examples where customers wanted to keep the tickets for reporting perspective, but just delete the attachments. Because at the end of the day, it’s the attachments on the tickets that are causing the storage issue.

So yeah, that’s what I found, that there was a lot of flexibility within your app. Well, I haven’t found a requirement yet from any of our clients that we haven’t been able to meet with your app.

How was your initial setup experience?

Excellent, to be honest. I had a chat with Andrew initially, who introduced and gave me a demo of the app, and then it’s really easy. We just sign up, get a credit card in there, and that’s it. Once I’ve done it once and got used to the app, it was really easy moving forward for any other clients that we implemented it on.

Really straightforward to use, easy functionality to understand, and lots of ‘Are you sure you want to do this’ sort of prompts to make sure what you do. Because when you’re doing deletion and sometimes hundreds or thousands of tickets at a time, it’s good to be able to sense-check what you’re doing to make sure you’re not deleting anything that shouldn’t be.

Could you share an example of a specific situation where you use the application?

It is mostly from a deletion perspective. As I say, some of our clients have got tickets that are 8 to 9 years old within the instance. And, we want to go to 3 years. So I’ve got 5 years’ worth of tickets to delete.

We’ve got a client that has level one, level two, level three, level four, and level five tickets. Level fives have a certain retention period on them. Level four is different. So we were able to clear the backlog based on those requirements.

Then, the good thing moving forward is the automation, because we can just set those automations running, and now I don’t have to think about it again. It’s just running in the background overnight, and it keeps everything nice and tidy.

Is it really a helpful app to go over the backlog?

Yeah, it’s just clearing that initial backlog that is the big thing. And then, once you’ve got that, you get the automation set up. It’s fantastic.

What pleasantly surprised you about working with the team and the product?

The support is fantastic. Whenever I’ve had an issue or a question, it’s Andriana who gets back to me really quickly and always with an answer to whatever issue I’ve had.

Another really good thing that I’ve noticed is that it’s continually developing, like the update that came out just a few days ago, where you can now quite easily delete tickets, and delete users who do not have tickets. And because that was a little bit more complex, where you had to do combined lists. But I can see that it’s continually evolving and adding features that clients need. So, yeah, I think that’s really refreshing.

Would you recommend the GDPR Compliance to others?

100%. To any Zendesk client who has any requirements around deleting tickets, above and beyond just the standard Zendesk rule.