How HomeExchange scaled support effectively by using Swifteq’s Zendesk apps
Swifteq products used:
Key results:
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Eliminated over 40 hours of manual work per month on translating tickets
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Automatically merging over 10,000 Zendesk tickets each month
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Implemented AI-powered workflows to eliminate low-value manual work
About HomeExchange
HomeExchange is a member-driven program and community that is reinventing how people around the world travel. Members pay an annual fee to join HomeExchange, and then can go on vacation as long and as frequently as they want by exchanging their home with other members from the community.
With over 180,000 members across 145 countries, HomeExchange’s approach to enabling anyone to travel in a responsible and human way is clearly resonating with people around the world.
Scaling a company brings all kinds of challenges, especially when you’re a customer support leader.
HomeExchange’s community has grown massively in the past two years, more than doubling, from 88,000 in 2022 to 183,000 in 2024. While this was great news for the company and its mission enable as many people as possible to go on vacation, and do so responsibly, doubling the customer base meant a dramatic increase in customer support tickets.
“Adapting to the fast-growing environment became a challenge for the Member Support team” summarizes Mayline, HomeExchange’s Projects & Operations Manager for Member Support. “That means our big challenge is figuring out how to help the team be more productive and to spend less time on manual non-added value tasks, while increasing agents' sense of accomplishment and competence, enabling them to tackle more complicated cases with more time and confidence.”
“We’re always looking to save time, especially on manual tasks that don’t add value for anyone. We want to save the precious time of our team so they can dedicate it to serving our members.”
The challenge
HomeExchange’s member support team consists of about 30 in-house support agents and number of outsourced agents. The member support team handles an average of 23,000 Zendesk tickets each month (across several different channels). Given HomeExchange’s global customer base, the team also provides support in seven different languages.
That many inbound tickets and languages is enough to keep any support team busy, but their workload was made worse by the urgency many members felt when issues or questions popped up.
Encountering issues while traveling can often feel like an emergency, which means the member support team often deals with the same member reaching out several times in a short period of time.
This results in multiple agents working on multiple Zendesk tickets for the same customer and issue — a recipe for wasted time, unnecessary work, and customer frustration.
The (first) solution
“Isn’t there something we can do to make this better?”
Those words often lead to innovation, and when Mayline — who was a project manager for the member support team at the time — asked them, she knew there had to be a solution.
Zendesk’s native solution for merging tickets is clunky and time consuming, requiring agents to manually click through several steps to complete the process (if they noticed multiple tickets from the same member at all).
Mayline knew there had to be a way to reduce the chaos and manual work involved, so she dove into the Zendesk marketplace. That eventually led her to Swifteq's Merge Duplicate Tickets, a Zendesk-approved solution for merging duplicate tickets with your own custom rules.
Mayline quickly estimated the time the app could save her, and convincing her boss to start a two-week free trial was a no-brainer.
“Within a week or two, we made a few minor adjustments and we could quickly see how many tickets were merged every day,’ she says.
“We had thousands of tickets merged automatically by the end of the month. It changed a lot for us really quickly.”
Automating translations to provide better help
The near-immediate impact of the Merge Zendesk Tickets app brought immediate relief to the member support team, giving Mayline and the rest of the leadership team more bandwidth to focus on other opportunities.
Because she was subscribed to the Swifteq blog, Mayline saw when Swifteq announced the release of the AI-powered Translate Conversations app.
With members in 145 countries, providing support in customers’ preferred languages was a unique challenge for HomeExchange. They officially provided support in seven languages, but they were limited by human capacity and scheduling.
“For example, we have one Dutch-speaking agent,” says Mayline. “When that agent isn’t available, we can’t easily provide real-time support in Dutch. And if an emergency ticket comes in, whoever is working would need to spend a lot of time copying and pasting Zendesk tickets into Google Translate to understand a customer’s request and provide support.”
Since they’d had such a quick and positive experience with the Merge Tickets app, they decided to run a trial and use Swifteq’s translation app on 1000 tickets.
It was a resounding success.
The team really liked having the ability to automatically translate and engage with customers in their preferred language, all without having to leave Zendesk’s Agent Workspace.
“Each agent was manually translating between 10 and 20 tickets in Google Translate every day,” remembers Mayline. “Implementing the Translate Conversations app saves us at least 3 hours per day across the team.”
Efficiency-boosting apps and responsive support
HomeExchange’s member support team was dealing with one other issue that most Zendesk users are familiar with: resolved tickets reopening when a customer replied with a “thank you.”
“It’s a funny problem, because you’re glad customers are thankful,” Mayline says. “But at the same time, it takes several seconds to solve that ticket again, and when you’re handling 23,000 tickets each month, that time adds up.”
She also points out how overwhelming it is for agents to open up a Zendesk view and see a bunch of reopened tickets — although, in this case, most of those tickets don’t need any real action.
Mayline reached out to Swifteq to see if the Triggers+ChatGPT app could help. While automatically resolving reopened “thank you” tickets wasn’t existing functionality, the Swifteq team worked with her to build out that capability.
And because the app is based on flexible ChatGPT prompts, it didn’t take long to implement it and see results.
“There’s a big quality of life improvement in all these apps,” says Mayline. “They’re saving our team time and making their work more enjoyable. They don’t have to do the same manual, annoying tasks ten or twenty times a day.”
And while the business impact — several hours saved each week — was clear, Mayline also highlighted the partnership between Swifteq and her team as a valuable piece of the puzzle.
“I trust Swifteq,” says Mayline. “If they launch a new app, I have no doubts about testing it out and paying for it if it works well for us. They’re quick to troubleshoot issues or even make product changes to make an app work better for us.”
Reflecting on the last few years of partnership, Mayline summarizes it like this:
“I’m really happy with the relationship we have with Swifteq — both tools and the support. If they were to disappear and I had to find great tools and company I can trust like this, it would be really hard.”