One screen for customer care

Business context

By 2026 Zigly's customer information lived in many places: orders in Shopify and Unicommerce, deliveries in ClickPost, appointments in VetBuddy, store bills in Wondersoft and points in Easy Rewards. Customer care sat in the middle and had to piece it together for every customer.

The problem

The ticketing tool from the earlier calling and ticketing project could hold tickets but couldn't help answer them. For a single question, an agent checked Unicommerce or ClickPost for order status, VetBuddy for appointments and Easy Rewards for points, one after another. New callers who could become customers weren't being followed up.

Who it affected

• Care agents, switching between systems for every ticket.
• Pet parents, waiting while the agent searched.
• The business, missing revenue from new callers who were never followed up.

Goals and how success was measured

Faster handling per ticket, one customer record across online and stores, and leads followed up in the same tool. Measured through average time per ticket, systems opened per ticket, and a reporting layer of about 23 core reports.

Role and scope

• Product lead: ran the vendor evaluation, mapped every channel and system into one requirement sheet with a business rule per system, and led the rollout and integrations.
• Planned the rollout in Jira and shared dated status updates with leadership.
• Specified the customer data migration from Shopify and the reporting layer.

Discovery and evidence

• Every channel customers use to reach Zigly, and every system an agent opens to answer them, was mapped into one requirement sheet with a business rule per system.
• Email phrases were consolidated into 50 ticket categories for routing.

Options considered

Criteria: platform cost, implementation cost, ease of development and flexibility. Cost was the deciding factor.

The solution

1. One screen for the agent: every system holding customer data feeds Zoho.
2. Rules decide ticket or lead: an existing customer's call becomes a ticket; a new caller becomes a lead.
3. Spot intent early: a new caller who calls again without buying becomes a High Potential User.
4. Capture the reason every time: call disposition is mandatory and drives ticket creation.
5. Phase it: service, leads and data first; campaigns and automation in phase 2.

Technical and operational considerations

• Calls: Ozonetel connects to Zoho through PhoneBridge for click-to-call, a screen pop of the matching contact or lead, and an automatic call log.
• Record sync: Zoho's upsert API updates a record if it already exists, so repeated syncs don't create duplicates.
• Customer migration: Shopify's customer base moved through a staged, audited pipeline that classified each record as ready, review or reject, favouring clean data over volume.

Execution and collaboration

• The rollout ran as five stories (workflow, integration, past-data upload, internal testing, acceptance testing) across 17 sources, tracked in Jira with dated status updates for leadership.
• Worked with the care team on rules and categories, and with each vendor on its integration.

Challenges and trade-offs

• Vendor readiness: several integrations were held up during the build by vendor-side issues: a data format that had to change, a production API that wasn't yet available, a plug-in that had to be replaced with webhooks, and two channels put on hold.
• Phasing: campaigns and automation were held for phase 2 so that service, leads and clean data came first.

Outcomes

Lessons

Every vendor's API readiness should be confirmed before the integration sprint, not discovered during it.