Case Study: Loom achieves prioritized, scalable Zendesk support with Census

How Loom delivers a great customer support experience in Zendesk with Census

Loom, the video messaging company, hired data scientist Buddy Marshburn to build out a fresh data infrastructure but ran into limits with their event-stream tool (Segment) when they needed to push aggregated, transformed warehouse data into third‑party systems. During COVID, offering Loom free to students and teachers created a surge of support requests that required prioritization in Zendesk based on users’ plan memberships—something they couldn’t accomplish with raw event streams. Buddy turned to Census to sync transformed data from their warehouse (using dbt) into downstream tools like Zendesk.

Using Census, Loom pointed Census at dbt‑prepared tables and populated Zendesk fields with single, aggregated values (e.g., plan membership) to triage and prioritize tickets. Census made a previously infeasible workflow functional, helping Loom work through a sea of tens of thousands of tickets, avoid hiring additional data engineers, centralize data access, and reduce maintenance overhead. Loom now plans to expand Census usage to Salesforce and other teams, extending the same measurable improvements across the organization.

Loom

Buddy Marshburn

Senior Data Scientist