How Chronext Uses Make to Automate Its Customer Service Processes

Chronext is a platform for luxury watches that combines the benefits of a marketplace (buying and selling) with security to ensure the authenticity of all watches that pass through. With over 10,000 watches in its inventory, providing fast, reliable, and secure service is a top priority for the German-based company. 

We interviewed Chronext’s Co-founder and CPO Ludwig Wurlitzer to learn about automation in their business, the impact of Make on their speed of development, and what a service like Make does for startups and companies of all sizes. 

Chronext, like many other companies, was looking for a way to automate simple repetitive tasks.

“We originally started using Zapier for some really basic stuff, like automating Google Sheets. I think with a lot of startups, you end up doing a lot of stuff yourself. You start off by doing a few basic automations. Just a little help that would save some manual work time.”

But as Chronext grew, their needs changed. They started to rely on more cloud-based software for their business processes. Wurlitzer shared his most prolific example of this with Zendesk, the customer service software. 

Chronext began using Zendesk as its key customer support software. If they could fully integrate their Zendesk workflows, it could speed up their response times to customers. 

As their comfort with the integration process grew, they realized that they could potentially do much more with the integration as a whole. Not only could it help with these use cases but it could also free up their time to develop other aspects of their business. 

Chronext eventually found their current solution lacked a few capabilities. The most notable were the ability to apply conditional logic and to do batch processing. Turning to their development team for help, they knew had the skill set, but not the time.

“We had built Zendesk automations with our own developers in the past, which was OK, but fairly time-consuming and not a very good use of our development resources. It is much faster with Make.”

Make was the solution they were looking for. 

Once Chronext got comfortable with the tool and discovered all of its power and features (including the conditional logic and batch processing they were searching for), they realized they could rely on Make to do a large portion of their integrations, instead of using their developer’s limited time to build the integrations themselves. It gave them the flexibility they wanted to work at the speed they wished.

“If you do these business process automations, the actual logic is 20% of the work and building, integrating, and placing code is 80%. With Make, you can shave away a lot of that coding time, and you can just focus on the business logic and implementing that. Once you get the hang of it, you can build stuff incredibly quickly.”

Most of Chronext’s use of Make has been around automating their customer service processes. They have used Zendesk’s internal integrations in the past but found that they were limited. So they have since moved entirely to Make. 

“I think what it meant for us is that there is much more opportunity for automating business logic. When you think about a solution, you immediately begin to think, ‘How am I going to build it with super scarce resources?’ What changed for us is now we can worry less about the implementation, and think more about the solution.”

Chronext’s automation journey began like many companies. They started with automating simple tasks to save time. 

But after getting quick results and more comfortable with automation, they begin to integrate more, automate more, and save more time. And for Chronext specifically, it has catapulted the pace to which they can develop and helped provide better customer service to their customers.

“I feel like it’s the difference between walking and riding a bicycle, you are just more efficient when you automate.”

We couldn't have said it better ourselves, friends.

Photo credit: Chronext