CASE STUDY:  TechSoup Customer Support

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Transforming Customer Support for a Global Nonprofit Network

From chatbot ask to ecosystem-wide support system

  • Role: Lead UX Strategist

  • Focus: Product UX, content strategy, and systems integration

  • Note: Supplementary visuals available on request due to NDA

About TechSoup

Overview:

  • Global network spanning 60+ countries

  • About 700 employees with HQ in San Francisco and regional hubs in Corinth, London, Warsaw

  • Serves 1M+ registered nonprofits worldwide

  • Supports spans multiple regions, languages, and systems — supporting nonprofit customers and corporate partners.

Project Brief

  • Ask: Create chatbot UX standards to reduce strain on CS team

  • Initial assumption: Adding online chat would relieve pressure

  • Emotional turning point: Realized chatbot alone couldn’t solve systemic issues

My Impact

Role: Lead UX Strategist, reporting to Senior VP

  • Identified systemic UX blockers and reframed them as business risks

  • Defined strategy, multi-phase rollout, UX vision

  • Led taxonomy, UI content, flows, wireframes, and design review

  • Directed cross-system prototyping and mockups

  • Built foundational assets for scalable implementation

  • Built and mentored a UX sub-team

  • Secured executive backing and dev alignment without authority

Obstacles in Discovery

  • Fragmented, outdated, inconsistent support content across dozens of sites

  • Conflicting terminology created confusion internally & externally

  • No clear ownership of content

  • Leadership focused on chatbot as a silver bullet

Cataloguing the Ecosystem

  • Catalogued content across dozens of scattered sites

  • Mapped gaps, contradictions, and orphaned content

  • Documented terminology inconsistencies as systemic problem

  • Impact: Baseline evidence for support site + glossary

Support Site Build: Obstacles

  • Dev teams overloaded; no capacity for a new build

  • Design team feared limited CMS would break brand consistency

  • Devs resisted owning site maintenance in unfamiliar system

  • Business feared lack of login integration

  • Execution hurdles included:

    • Testing confusion

    • Migration bottlenecks

    • Domain setup

Support Site Build: My Moves

  • Selected Zendesk after weighing CMS options; aligned with tickets/chatbot

  • Created brand-compliant designs myself

  • Embedded governance: topic ownership + CS training

  • Built login-free UX to integrate smoothly across ecosystem

  • Iterated to resolve execution hurdles

  • Impact: Launched single source of truth — brand-aligned, scalable, resilient

Glossary (Consistency & Brand Integrity)

  • Trigger: Discovery exposed terminology chaos

  • Obstacles:

    • Politically sensitive

    • Bandwidth-limited owners

    • Restrictive CMS

  • My moves:

    • Secured executive sponsorship

    • Built glossary tool on intranet

    • Designed searchable UI despite tech limits

    • Established governance with exec pre-approval

  • Impact: One brand, one voice across the global network

Chatbot Guidelines & Integration

  • Obstacles:

    • Local teams needed custom settings for availability schedules

    • Out-of-box Zendesk chatbot UI was cluttered and confusing

  • My moves:

    • Authored global chatbot UX guidelines

    • Integrated bots to pull directly from the support site

    • Redesigned functionality & flow for clear self-service

    • Reconfigured UI architecture to handle local schedules

  • Impact: Expanded CS capacity while giving users instant, reliable answers

Cross-Site Search

  • Trigger: Users began journeys on other ecosystem sites

  • Obstacles:

    • Support site risked invisibility

    • Integration required aligning with multiple design systems

    • Dev delays for API research

  • My moves:

    • Designed integration patterns

    • Secured quick approvals

    • Negotiated decoupled rollout

  • Impact: Support answers surfaced ecosystem-wide, wherever users searched

Sustainability & Adoption

  • Obstacles:

    • Risk of ownership fading

    • Lack of accountability across departments

    • Bloated email templates

    • Teams untrained in UX writing or brand phrasing

  • My moves:

    • Embedded glossary and site into workflows, onboarding, style guides

    • Formalized governance with quarterly refresh cycles + exec sponsorship

    • Consolidated and rewrote templates, reducing length by 80%

    • Trained teams in UX writing and glossary use

  • Impact: Users got consistent answers; reduced CS training time; improvements scaled globally

Defining the Win

  • Ask vs Reality: From chatbot fix → ecosystem transformation

  • Obstacles: Leadership’s narrow focus; underlying chaos

  • Emotional turning point: Pride in turning hopelessness into design opportunity

  • Impact: Transformed support for 1M+ nonprofits

    • Fewer dead ends

    • Faster answers

    • More reliable experience

Key Takeaways

  • Leadership asked for a chatbot fix

  • Delivered a sustainable, ecosystem-wide solution

  • Key wins:

    • Single source of truth

    • Unified language

    • Chatbot integration

    • Lasting governance

  • Result: Reliable support for 1M+ nonprofits, scalable into the future

Appendix — Visual Assets

  • TBD