Insurance startup Openly taps Zendesk to help outpace competition

When people think about buying insurance, the word “simple” doesn’t often come to mind. Openly’s founders set out to change that perception by creating a truly simple and straightforward way to provide premium, comprehensive home insurance.

Using a combination of insurance expertise, actuarial science, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies, Openly provides premium insurance that is robust in coverage and simple to administer. The company empowers independent insurance agents to deliver outstanding service with speed and ease. Since launching in 2017, Openly has grown rapidly from small startup to next-generation insurance provider, with over 300 employees and product offerings in 21 states across the U.S. The team continues driving success with innovative products that allow agents to deliver a superior customer experience, radically increase agency efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction.

Empowering startup success with Zendesk

Seeking the best CX system to match its technology-driven insurance, Openly joined the Zendesk for Startups Zendesk for Startups program in 2020 and has been on a trajectory for growth ever since.

When Tim Kyse signed on as Vice President of Customer Experience in 2022, he was already a “happy Zendesk customer.” He’d been using the platform at various startups since 2011 and leveraged Zendesk to enhance customer service and scale his CX teams.

“There are so many people that know how to build on Zendesk,” shares Kyse. “If you use Zendesk, you can attract talent from a larger pool of people. Access to talent is always a challenge for startups.”
Zendesk also offers a simpler user experience, which is valuable to a fast growing company. “Other CX software tries to match Zendesk but comes up short,” adds Kyse. “Zendesk gets tickets into our system, routes them, and lets our team respond quickly and get them closed.”

With easy-to-use tools in place, Kyse can focus on growing and learning alongside his team. “One of the reasons why I like the startup world is because if you make it simple, you can evolve it to continue to be simple.”

Openly Founders Matt Wielbut (left) and Ty Harris (right).

A tailored service experience

Kyse is dedicated to streamlining the support experience for Openly’s primary customers: the independent agents that sell their insurance. His team functions like a customer success department for these agents by helping them access the customer portal and answering questions about quotes and rate changes. He also oversees a contact center for agents.

While Openly doesn’t sell insurance directly to consumers, the company does provide support to policy holders and mortgage lenders that reach out with questions.

Tailoring service for these different types of Openly customers can be challenging. So, Kyse takes a holistic approach and looks beyond his support team to the various departments that shape customer experience, including business development for prospecting new agents, the customer portal for providing quotes, the insurance product, and marketing.

Expert support in 30 seconds or less

Openly also thinks outside the box when it comes to agent specialization. Instead of using customer service representatives to answer support calls, the company hires, trains, and licenses insurance agents to ensure a premium customer experience. Once agents get licensed in one state, they are qualified to answer questions from any customer.

“We’re able to solve customer issues quickly because we have very skilled, knowledgeable agents. From there, we just train them in the Openly experience and how to work with our technology,” explains Kyse. “We built functionality and operate Zendesk workflows to get calls and chats answered within 30 seconds or less. We’ve heard from our customers that they love how easy it is to quote in our system, and that’s helped build our reputation.”

That support model has proven effective in reducing delays in service. It also creates an expectation that the customer will be connected to an insurance expert and receive high quality service quickly. Those improvements have helped generate 96 percent customer satisfaction and given Openly a major competitive advantage in the insurance market where lightning-fast service is rare.

Faster, streamlined service with chat

Openly has 30 agents leveraging Zendesk Enterprise support, voice, chat, knowledge base, and reporting. Chat remains the most popular channel, because it allows customers to do other things in between responses, rather than just waiting on the phone.

“Our customers love chat, and agents can handle three chats at a time using macro shortcuts,” says Kyse. “Since implementing web forms, we’ve also seen a 94 percent first contact resolution and a shorter resolution time.”

Combining omnichannel support with automations helped the team increase efficiency as well. “We’ve created easy workflows in Zendesk that allow our internal team to resolve the ticket, fire off a macro response to the customer, select fields for tagging, and close the ticket quickly. We cut our wrap-up time after each phone call from three minutes to just one minute,” shares Kyse.

His next steps for CX include “building out a new help center in Zendesk to enable better self-service and deeper analytics, and to help drive customers to chat and email. We’re looking at the help center as a way to proactively deflect tickets.”

Advice to the next generation of startups

Kyse has been a big fan of the Zendesk Community from day one, citing it as the first channel he turns to with questions because there are so many CX experts available. Support Driven and the Slack community for startups are his other go-to resources.

When it comes to launching Zendesk, he advises startups to “just go for it” by setting up email, phone, and a public knowledge base first. “Start small. Identify your 10 top pain points and create great articles so you can support people 24/7. Then get data reporting set up,” suggests Kyse. “We have built hundreds of templates and themes of help centers in Zendesk.”

His main rule of thumb: “Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. Create a design of what you want to accomplish in the first three months, then document everything you’ve done so change management will be easier in the future.”

Openly’s Tim Kyse, Vice President of Customer Experience, is third from the right.

Zendesk is “part of my DNA”

When Kyse joined the team, Openly was already in active growth mode with an expanding employee base, increasing ticket volume, coverage extending to new states, and new policies being written. Ever since, he’s been using technology to drive an efficient CX team, which enabled ongoing growth without adding headcount.

Kyse is getting his team poised for future growth, thanks to Zendesk integrations with Lessonly, an LMS system, Salesforce, Playlist, and Tickler (a standard operating procedure for trainees). Openly is also interested in using AI with their chatbot, but they’re taking it slow due to strict regulations and insurance compliance.

“Zendesk has been part of my DNA for a long time now. One day we’re going to get to a point where Openly will be an enterprise volume company, so having Zendesk in place now as a foundational piece is critical,” says Kyse. “You can integrate pretty much anything you want into Zendesk. As we grow, that will allow us to scale no matter what.”