Asana's Success Story

ASANA

“With SalesforceIQ and Desk.com we can easily share the data we need to develop long-term relationships with customers.”

Kenny Van Zant, Head of Operations

Customer visibility keeps everyone on the same page

The most successful business leaders know that to make it in a competitive marketplace, everyone in a company needs to focus on customers. To offer exceptional experiences, employees need to have easy access to information. There’s simply no room in today’s world for siloed data or a lack of transparency, so at Asana, customer focus is part of the company’s DNA.

Asana builds software that empowers teams to do great things together. It’s the best place for companies to track your work with their teams, so they can drive projects to completion and produce great results. Asana is easy enough for anyone to use, and powerful enough for everything they are working on. Some of the best companies in the world — like Uber, Dropbox, and Pinterest — use it to run their companies, keep themselves organized, and do great things.

When seasoned customer service professional Brian Boroff started leading the young startup’s customer support efforts, he knew that the team would need software to help manage customer service, so the company could maintain a customer focus as it grew.

Van Zant had seen firsthand what could happen if a company waited until things escalated out of control before putting sales and support solutions in place, and he didn’t want that to happen at Asana. Still, he hesitated to make the investment. He was afraid of tying the team to traditional technologies that no one wanted to use, and that wouldn’t actually help them deliver on their goal of innovative and streamlined collaboration.

Then he discovered Desk.com and SalesforceIQ.

“Any employee can get up and running on Salesforce in just a few minutes, so it’s really easy to expand the number of people interacting with customers.”

BRIAN BOROFF, HEAD OF CUSTOMER SUCCESS & USER OPERATIONS AT ASANA

Efficiency can be easy

Asana’s team chose SalesforceIQ because it approaches relationship management differently than traditional CRM products.

“SalesforceIQ offers a more people-centric way to track and collaborate on sales relationships,” said Van Zant. “And it’s incredibly easy to get started.”

Asana uses SalesforceIQ to track sales activity, customer success programs, and post-sales workflows with customers that include other fast-growing startups such as Rdio and Uber. Instead of sending internal emails, teammates use SalesforceIQ to comment in the data stream. This keeps conversations in context, while also reducing email volume. Teammates assign follow-ups when they hand deals off to colleagues, which further streamlines the way customer-facing teams work together.

Asana also chose Desk.com for customer support because the app makes it easy to communicate with customers through email, Web, Twitter, and Facebook — all in one place. The company quickly grew to love its ease of use and flexibility as well.

“Any employee can get up and running on Desk.com in just a few minutes, so it’s really easy to expand the number of people interacting with customers,” said Van Zant. “It helps our support team be more efficient, even during periods of extraordinary growth, and keeps everyone focused on customers.”

And, with Desk.com, Asana’s team can quickly update workflow rules on the fly, so the company can easily respond during busy times or when a business process needs to be changed.

A focus on happy customers

SalesforceIQ has helped Asana refine sales processes, and because the system automatically captures communications activity, all data is clean, accurate, delivered nearly in real-time, and easy to share.

“We are heavily invested in customer relationships,” Van Zant said. “With SalesforceIQ, I don’t have to ask people how their deals are going and rely on their interpretation of the facts when we make business decisions. I can get past the numbers into the meat of every relationship.”

Desk.com helps increase transparency and leverage customer insights around the company. The customer support team regularly reports on customer issues and shares feedback at company meetings, and works directly with the product management team to tweak existing features or add new ones.

Van Zant explained, “We use Desk.com to read and track every piece of customer feedback, which makes the support team instrumental in building a product road map that delivers what customers really want.”

Desk.com and SalesforceIQ have encouraged collaboration among Asana’s customer-facing teams, even through rapid growth. It’s easy for employees to share information so everyone at the company has a complete view of every customer and can deliver exceptional experiences — every time.