Capture connects CX and engineering with Zendesk

Capture is a U.K.-based digital asset management company that serves some of the biggest names in British media—clients whose businesses rely on secure storage and easy access to their images and videos.

With that level of responsibility for irreplaceable digital assets, Capture treats customer support as part of their product itself.

“Support is literally the heart of what we do,” says Anna Katz, Head of Client Services at Capture. “Every single client and every single person within each company that we’re working with matters.”

Even with a small team of about 23 people, Capture keeps high-stakes workflows moving, even when tasks take a wrong turn.

“Obviously, things can go wrong,” Simon Mallindine, Director of AI strategy at Capture, notes. “But what people judge you on is not whether things go wrong, but how you react.”

Capture has been steadily scaling since its founding in 2000. But balancing growth while catering to its roster of high-profile clients doesn’t come without its challenges, especially when support tickets get technical.

Leaving behind a homegrown system that couldn’t keep up

For years, Capture ran customer support on a homegrown ticketing system. It worked well—until it didn’t.

“It was really hard to figure out what was going on,” says Mallindine. “Our old ticketing system had almost no stats and very little visibility. And depending on where you looked, you got a different answer about the urgency of the ticket.”

With high-pressure workflows, Capture’s customers depend on quick responses to their inquiries. And with that lack of clarity, it became obvious that Capture needed to find a new system.

“We needed a platform where we could actually see what was going on and pass that data effectively between teams,” Mallindine explains. “Something had to change.”

Why Zendesk won: integration, visibility, and speed

Mallindine evaluated several well-known platforms before landing on Zendesk, and the process quickly clarified what Capture didn’t need. Jira Service Management was powerful, but it was built for a very different scale.

“If I was back in my old job at a bank where we had 3,000 desktops, it’d be a great product, but it was not the right fit for us,” he says. “The service teams and the tech teams don’t speak the same language, and we wanted a tool that was specialized for service.”

Tools like HubSpot and Salesforce fell short for a different reason.

“Those are CRM companies and that’s what they’re really good at,” Mallindine explains. “What we needed was someone who is a specialist in support.”

In the end, the choice came down to Zendesk versus Freshdesk. “Feature parity was close” says Mallindine. What made the difference was how well Zendesk fit Capture’s operating reality.

“Zendesk’s Jira integration was more seamless,” Mallindine explains. “It allows support and engineering to work in separate systems while still passing data cleanly between them.”

And for Capture, visibility into support also mattered.

“At the time, reporting was quite important to me because I didn’t really know what was going on in support,” Mallindine says. “Zendesk had better reporting then, and for my money, you’ve improved it even more since.”

Zendesk connects support and engineering

Ultimately, Capture made the switch over to Zendesk. And the first project was massive: migrating thousands of historical tickets containing messy data into a new system.

“We went from signing the contract to having all our historical data cleaned, migrated, and fully live in Zendesk within 12 weeks,” Mallindine says. “And the integration with Jira was seamless.”

The deciding factor was speed and partnership. Before Capture had even signed a contract, Zendesk assigned an account manager who helped map the transition end to end.

“What could have taken a year with Freshdesk was completed with Zendesk in just a few months,” says Mallindine. “That was the thing that swung it for us.”

Zendesk keeps support and product work connected without forcing teams to switch between tools.

“You don’t want to spend your day swiveling your chair,” Mallindine says. “You just want it all to happen in front of you.”

Support agents can create Jira issues directly from Zendesk with one click, automatically passing over the ticket context engineers need.

“It mustn’t be any effort for that to happen,” Mallindine says. “If they’ve got to go to a different screen, you’ve lost them.”

Once work is underway, the integration keeps everyone aligned. Engineers can see Zendesk ticket comments from within Jira, which is critical in a world where developers don’t live in Zendesk day to day.

Building toward AI-powered self-service

With AI, Capture is playing the long game.

“AI is not going anywhere, it’s the future,” Mallindine says. “And it is a platform shift as big as the internet in the late ‘90s.”

Next, the focus is expanding self-service so the team can spend more time on the hardest, highest-value questions.

“We’ve been building using the Zendesk help center to create AI-generated articles,” Mallindine says. “And some of those are getting really good.”

As Capture continues to grow, connected systems and AI-enabled knowledge will help the company scale without sacrificing its human touch.

“We’re doing pretty well and growing quite nicely,” says Mallindine. “And Zendesk is with us every step of the way.”