Zendesk

From initiatives as large as accelerating business transformation to as small as increasing personal productivity, Lucid is saving Zendesk team members time so they can focus on work that impacts business goals. 

“Lucid AI will help you to lighten the load of process documentation and diagramming and enable you to focus on improving and streamlining processes…”
—Gene Gino-Gino, Lead Digital Designer

Creating complex process diagrams

"We’re a company that focuses on automation and ease of implementation of data... I’m just trying to do tasks faster... [Lucid AI] definitely helps to optimize that and just increase accuracy."
—Tyrell Siagi, Senior Equity Plan Administrator

A Senior Equity Plan Administrator uses Lucid AI’s diagramming capabilities to create a powerful starting point for complex process maps. Typically, he puts a prompt in Lucid AI and describes the specific process he’s working on in as much detail as possible, and Lucid AI generates a diagram he can then iterate on quickly, without manually adding a bunch of arrows and shapes. He likes that Lucid AI adds considerations that were missing from his original prompt but “doesn’t go outside the boundaries.”

This Senior Equity Plan Administrator updates process diagrams for SOX compliance quarterly and uses Lucid AI to create other stock and payroll compliance diagrams monthly, saving 45-90 minutes on high-concentration, manual work per month. He shares these diagrams with 25-35 stakeholders across payroll, accounting, and legal teams and uses AI to add a summary of the diagram so leadership has a description of what they’re reviewing.

In addition to creating and updating process diagrams faster, he also says that Lucid AI reminds him of what certain shapes mean in a diagram. 

Likewise, a Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead uses Lucid AI to get ideas for sequence and activity diagrams and to uncover edge cases he wasn’t thinking about. He says using Lucid AI as a starting point is not only faster but also “motivating” because he doesn’t have to diagram from scratch. 

“I often use the product of AI as inspiration for what I want to do.”
—Bartosz Kowalski, Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead

This tech lead also says Lucid AI provides concise answers rather than a “wall of text.” 

A Senior Software Engineer uses Lucid AI to generate various architecture diagrams with a basic, one-line command. As a result, he can produce multiple iterations and concepts within two hours, including creating the prompt. Overall, Lucid AI saves him about 15-18 hours monthly. 

“[Lucid] AI speeds architecture decision-making and reduces technical debt by converting specs into consistent, versioned diagrams with smart suggestions and collaboration built in.”
—Aditya Tiwari, Senior Software Engineer

Other Zendesk team members using Lucid to create complex process maps include:

• A Technical Account Manager who creates architecture diagrams documenting complex customer environments and uses Lucid AI to “beautify” the diagrams and generate additional ideas
• A Senior Principal Customer Success Manager who maps out current vs. future states for her customers and uses Lucid to see where the “white space” is, where competitors are, and where there are integration opportunities

"I think that [Lucid] allows us to really get a firm understanding of the customer's operations... it allows us to quickly pivot, allows us to quickly give an overview to executives in a really easy to understand way. ... It’s really helpful in terms of transitions between accounts, executive reviews, understanding where we need to go in the organization to develop more opportunities and expand and protect our business."
—Tara Myles, Senior Principal Customer Success Manager

Simplifying processes to accelerate business transformation

A Transformation and Operational Excellence Lead and her team use Lucid to simplify processes that accelerate organizational change and business transformation. 
This lead uses Lucid weekly for process mapping and gathering feedback, and she then translates that work into a standard operating procedure (SOP) or Confluence page for team members to reference. She describes Lucid AI’s role as providing a “core visual” for existing processes to help her identify where there are gaps or where a process could be simplified. She uses Lucid to answer, “What is preventing us from getting to the simple version of said process?” With Lucid, she saves one to two hours in getting to a future-state process map, saving her two to four hours per month.  

“There's so much change fatigue that to come in and read a document is the last thing people want to do, but to be able to have an aligned-upon visual…as your starting point and then clean it up and have that translate into your documentation as the first thing people see, before you get into all the words that no one wants to read, has been incredibly helpful.” 
—Tiann Nelson-Luck, Transformation and Operational Excellence Lead

This lead and her team also used Lucid as one of their main solutions for merger and acquisition work. During one acquisition, they mapped out processes for both companies, as well as ways to bring them together, and identified issues with routing rules for a new product within their system. As a result, Zendesk was able to integrate with the new company about 40% faster than previous acquisitions. 

 “Lucid was used throughout to bring people together to have the conversations, to do the planning, and that just made alignment between our tech teams, our support subject matter experts on the call, leadership, etc. all speak the same language…sooner, which definitely helped move things along more smoothly.”
—Tiann Nelson-Luck, Transformation and Operational Excellence Lead

Bridging raw data and stakeholder-ready insights

A Senior Data and Analytics Analyst uses Lucid to organize the outputs and inputs he uses for data analysis.

For example, this analyst will copy and paste data fields (sometimes as many as 700 or more fields) from Snowflake into a Lucid AI prompt, add context from the stakeholder requesting the data, and use Lucid AI to distill the data fields into organized categories and translate complex SQL queries into entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs). Lucid AI translates 120+ lines of SQL into a diagram in about 30 seconds, saving this analyst the time it would take to manually map data relationships. He says that, with Lucid, he can avoid getting “lost” in long text chats.

A Staff Software Engineer also uses Lucid AI to turn large SQL queries into ERDs in one to two minutes. He says the same task would take at least one hour to do without Lucid AI, making it “not worth the effort.”

Taking action on team feedback

A Technical Program Manager and her team use Lucid for remote collaboration. For example, she attended a workshop with about 20 participants where some team members were in office, and some were joining remotely. They used Lucid for gathering thoughts and feedback and then had Lucid AI generate outcomes. 

This program manager also uses Lucid to visualize timelines and turn Lucid Cards into Jira tickets for the team to take action on.

“I just simply love [the Jira integration] because it saves a lot of time. I can put together a timeline. I can discuss with people. I can easily move everything around. And when it's completed, I can just click a button, and I have a Jira ticket in place.”
—Maryna Sobolieva, Program Manager

The previously mentioned Senior Data and Analytics Analyst, along with other data analysts, uses a Dynamic Table in Lucid to keep track of the details of their analytics dashboards, such as why the dashboard is being used, the impact of the dashboard, and who requested the dashboard. The senior data analyst says Lucid was a “pretty” way to present the information as opposed to using slide decks. When the group initially set up the Lucid board, they joined a Zoom call, opened the Lucid board, and built the board within an hour.

Engineers use Lucid for regular team retrospectives. One software engineer sets up his feedback for retrospectives by putting sprint goals and accomplishments into a Lucid AI prompt and having it generate sticky notes on the team retrospective board. 

Several engineers use Lucid’s AI sort ideas feature to group sticky notes by theme after a retrospective, with one citing that the feature saves his team of eight people eight minutes per meeting. 

Finally, engineers use Lucid’s AI to summarize their retrospectives. Preparing the next steps after the retrospective used to take one engineering manager two to three hours, and now it only takes about 10 minutes.

By using Lucid AI to create powerful visuals quickly, Zendesk teams are able to move their work—and their business initiatives—forward faster.