An inevitable by-product of customer growth is an increasing number of support inquiries. Early in 2014, Acquia decided that bold action was needed. Acquia’s old request management system worked well for a small startup but as a medium-sized company, its capabilities were slowing us down.

Replacing it with a Drupal-based solution makes some sense, but how far would you go? The build vs. buy decision, a perpetual question in software selection, was once again ours to wrestle into submission. Add to the mix a tight project delivery date due to an expiring vendor contract, the migration of 101,000 support tickets, and the preservation of our 24x7 business-as-usual customer experience, this project quickly sized up to be a wild adventure taken by a tireless cabal of engineers, customer solutions staffers, ux specialists, and customers, not to mention the new vendor.

This session will describe how Acquia how Acquia got fast and furious in two weeks by choosing and implementing both - build and buy. Our customer-facing portal is in Drupal, powered by the Zendesk API on the backend. Our request management, agent productivity tools, and workflows use the Zendesk agent UI in conjunction with custom Acquia apps. As a successful project, we continue to build on this flexible platform to provide customers with a rich online experience.

Intended audience:
Anyone who seeks to introduce new or incorporate existing infrastructure while still delivering a maintainable solution. Also, for those looking for enterprise approaches to how they could leverage Drupal and a third-party solution to effectively respond, manage, and report on customer inquiries, from sales to support, within their own organization or across clients.