Case Study: Upwork achieves 90% self-service adoption with Zendesk Talk

Upwork - Customer Case Study

Upwork, the world’s largest online marketplace for freelancers, needed to scale and simplify support for a fully distributed workforce of staff and up to 700 freelancers while serving clients across 180 countries. To provide a seamless, omnichannel experience, Upwork adopted Zendesk Talk solutions—using Zendesk Support alongside Zendesk Guide and Zendesk Chat (with an inContact integration for phone)—so agents could access centralized ticket history and serve customers consistently across email, chat, phone and self-service.

Zendesk Talk helped Upwork centralize channels, promote self-service, and tailor channel access for freelancers using data integrations; agents now handle focused channels and use chat to guide users through projects. The result: 90% self-service adoption, a 20% improvement in adherence to chat SLAs, 50% productivity gains, improved first-touch resolution and fewer escalations—demonstrating clear operational and customer experience improvements enabled by Zendesk Talk.

Upwork

Joe Wang

Director of Customer Experiences