The challenge
With the ambitious goal of streaming their flagship annual customer conference to a global audience while delivering an intentional user experience, Zendesk, the industry-leading CX platform sought a robust digital event platform solution that could handle the complexities of a large-scale enterprise event. The key to success was a strategic partnership focused on customization, user journey design, and connectivity, delivering localized content experiences to a large, global audience.
Each year, Zendesk Relate brings together users from around the globe to explore ideas and innovations around customer success. Zendesk needed a partner who could deliver a customized digital event platform solution to fit their exact needs - a relationship they had to-date been unable to achieve with any other event platform partner, resulting in previous virtual events falling short of the company's ambitious goals.
The solution
BigMarker and Zendesk forged their partnership on a foundation of close communication and collaboration to bring Zendesk's vision to life. Unique challenges were met with unique solutions through in-depth collaboration. The outcome was an digital event platform built on the pillars of customization, global accessibility, and an intentionally designed attendee journey.
Zendesk’s need for complete design control was met in two specific ways throughout its partnership with BigMarker.
The first was a custom-tailored registrant journey to match the Relate team's unique requirements. Zendesk provided design specifications, and a collaborative approach enabled a unique event platform architecture that balanced BigMarker's platform capabilities with Zendesk's unique design vision.
The second was a custom marketing automation system (MAS) integration, which was designed to streamline data capture, analytics, and reporting to achieve Zendesk's ambitious demand generation goals.
Targeting a global audience of customer experience (CX) practitioners meant careful planning to delight attendees from a variety of regions, cultures, and industries. BigMarker's solution provided seamless global event management, which took into consideration the languages and local time differences across regions accessing each event.
Zendesk Relate offered multiple event platform instances in localized languages, providing a range of live, simulive, and on-demand content to maximize accessibility and engagement across Zendesk's global customer community.
The program carefully considered long-term return on investment, deploying an on-demand video hub with curated, localized content that global audiences could benefit from for years to come, allowing customers to engage with the event conveniently and flexibly.
The solution also provided an easy and scalable way for the Zendesk events team to build and modify their digital events platform. By creating a custom template library for Zendesk Relate, team members were able to build and modify content with a plug-and-play, copy and paste approach, reducing preparation time, improving efficiency, and empowering the events team with the autonomy to easily navigate program changes, despite aggressive timelines.
Results delivered
BigMarker’s collaboration with Zendesk Relate demonstrates the power of a more in-depth, strategic collaboration to provide the highest level of event customization and integration with the broader marketing technology stack, to create a delightful audience experience, while delivering an efficient, streamlined workflow for event admins.
By working proactively to continuously refine process and ways of work, BigMarker and Zendesk together deployed a robust, user-friendly platform that paved the way for a successful global event that achieved the highest levels of attendee satisfaction, while exceeding Zendesk's demand generation goals.
