Case Study: The Salvation Army achieves 99% internal IT CSAT and faster self‑service with Zendesk Talk

The Salvation Army's IT team empowers employees to serve—and self-serve

The Salvation Army’s Western Territory IT team was struggling with scale and an inflexible in‑house ticketing system that made small changes take weeks and offered poor self‑service for thousands of employees. To create a centralized, feature‑rich help center and better reporting, they evaluated several options and chose Zendesk solutions — deploying Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide and Zendesk Talk Partner Edition (vendor: Zendesk Talk).

Using Zendesk Talk’s suite, the team integrated Zendesk with Microsoft Active Directory and their Cisco phone system, onboarded 101 agents, and built a growing knowledge base of 1,300+ articles. The deployment (started June 2016) drove measurable gains: in October 2017 the IT department logged 6,505 new tickets and solved 6,298, met internal SLAs for most issues, and achieved a 99% internal CSAT — with routine system changes now doable in hours rather than weeks.

The Salvation Army

Katina Durrent

Assistant Director of IT Support