How Ramp handles requests 12X faster with Avenue

12x

faster response times to cross-functional product questions

8-10

hours saved per month

30+

automated workflows introduced across teams

Learn why Avenue is Ramp’s “go-to tool to track cross-functional work.”

About

Ramp is the all-in-one platform for modern finance teams, combining corporate cards with expense management, bill payments, vendor management, accounting automation, and more. Named Fast Company’s 2023 Most Innovative Company in North America, Ramp is NYC’s fastest-growing startup.

“Avenue keeps your operations teams lean, driven, and gets them high levels of visibility. The ability to unify and streamline operational workflows has been critical for Ramp as we scale.”

Tony Rios

Director of Product Operations at Ramp

Challenge

As they scaled, Ramp needed a scalable system for using customer feedback to drive product improvement

Ramp has experienced enormous growth over the past few years, expanding from 100 to 700 people. As they scale, Ramp wants to keep putting customer voices first. They use feedback to influence everything from feature launches to customer support strategy, making sure the right feedback reaches the right channels, whether for product, risk, or sales.

As a fast-growing fintech startup, they knew it would take careful planning to hit service level agreements (SLAs) without bloating headcount, and disseminate crucial information across their entire organization. While Ramp’s response times were within SLAs, their process was often manual, inefficient, and time-consuming, especially when it required input from different teams.

Tony Rios leads the product operations team, which harnesses user feedback and core data to drive product improvements and keep customer-facing teams informed about product updates. Too often, his team was refreshing multiple dashboards throughout the day, manually searching for issues and feedback. Things got especially complex when requests involved multiple departments — say, a credit limit increase requested by the sales team through Slack, to be assessed by risk operations in Zendesk.

These communication silos led to cumbersome, distracting workflows. For example, Tony and his team would screenshot material and manually send it to colleagues, trusting them to resolve issues with no real visibility or oversight. He knew they could do better.

He wanted to work faster and build an efficient, standardized way to manage cross-functional workflows. But achieving that goal would only get more complex as Ramp continued to grow. To keep collaboration flowing cross-functionally, Ramp needed a tool that would seamlessly bring customer data into all their teams’ daily workflows.

“Having Avenue as a connector to our core databases has been crucial for visibility. Before, we had no real way to alert cross-functional teams about new tickets, or see how many requests were actually getting solved.”

Solution

Avenue’s custom alerts keep teams connected to customers — and to each other

Tony was introduced to Avenue through Ramp’s own lead recruiter, who’d worked with Avenue CEO Justin Bleuel in his prior role at Uber. As he looked into the platform, Tony immediately saw potential ways Avenue could streamline Ramp’s complex business systems.

Now, Ramp uses Avenue to standardize workflows, keep ops teams on top of what matters, and handle complex requests cross-functionally. Tony and his team no longer need to keep refreshing their dashboards in search of issues. Instead, they set up alerts to loop them in at the right time, automatically directing their energy to where it will have the most impact.

For example, Avenue gives Product Ops real-time insights into customer feedback for new features and makes it simple to spread to other teams. “When we launch a new feature, we want to know customer sentiment in real time,” says Tony. “With Avenue, we automatically tag Zendesk tickets related to the launch, then alert the right team by sending it to a designated Slack channel." Teams like product, who don’t live out of Zendesk, now have visibility into how customers are reacting to new features. Similar workflows allow Ramp to seamlessly resolve other cross-functional requests, like new surveys submitted by customers or the credit limit increases mentioned above.

“Avenue bridges the gap, allowing all our teams to work where they want to work,” says Tony. Alerts let Ramp’s teams submit, process, and resolve requests without leaving the tools they’re already working in, such as Zendesk and Slack.

“Avenue offers the flexibility to set up really unique alerts. We’ve been able to choose different data sources, creating proactive alerts that have unified how our cross-functional teams work together.”

Results

With Avenue, Ramp is handling requests 12x faster and effortlessly collaborating across teams

Avenue has freed up Ramp’s operations teams to respond more quickly to customer queries, without additional resources. Tony and his team don’t need to keep one eye open for operations issues. Avenue alerts them to what needs their attention, and keeps teams working in sync to put customer voices first.

Ramp has already seen results like:

12x faster response times to cross-functional product questions
8-10 hours a month saved on product operations
30 automated workflows introduced across teams

Moving forward, Tony plans to keep onboarding more teams to Avenue and unifying Ramp’s internal workflows. For Ramp, Avenue is the secret to enabling cross-functional collaboration at scale.