Canva turns customer insights into action with Zendesk

Canva was founded with a simple but ambitious mission: make design accessible to everyone. Today, people in more than 190 countries use Canva monthly. Users can create anything from flyers and brochures to an in-depth marketing campaign. The platform also offers tools to create audio, video, and websites.

As Canva expands across the globe, every customer conversation becomes an opportunity, not just to resolve an issue, but to also understand how the product could become even easier to use.

“One of our biggest challenges before partnering with Zendesk was pure scale,” Mark Capps, Head of User Voice at Canva, says. “We were growing quickly, and we needed to understand the context of what was causing our customers’ challenges so we could help to fix them.”

Scaling support without losing the customer voice

Today, Zendesk serves as Canva’s centralized customer service platform, giving teams a single place to manage customer conversations, identify emerging issues, and route insights back to the teams responsible for improving the product.

“A great customer experience for Canva results in incredible customer loyalty,” Capps says. “We really strive to make complex things simple. And when we can make complex things simple for our customers, they can achieve all the dreams that they have.”

The company routes conversations via Omnichannel Routing (OCR), channeling customer feedback across specialist teams.

“A majority of our traffic is routed through OCR,” says Mos Siddiqui, Systems Engineer at Canva. “And it’s automatically distributed to specialists based on capacity.”

Building a customer feedback engine

Canva gathers customer feedback across multiple channels, analyzes recurring themes, prioritizes the highest-impact opportunities, and collaborates across engineering, product, marketing, and customer experience teams to improve the platform.

Once improvements are made, Canva communicates those updates back to customers, reinforcing that their feedback has been heard.

“Our entire organization understands that at the heart of solving customer challenges of customer experience, we have to be able to close the loop,” Capps says. “Because if we’re not closing the loop, we’re just churning out neat products that may either have issues or may not meet customers’ needs.”

Optimizing support with Zendesk

Canva has grown from 60 million users in 2021 to over a quarter of a billion million users today, with Zendesk supporting Canva’s growth as it enters new markets, segments and acquires businesses. As Canva scales, its User Voice team partners closely with Zendesk Premier Enterprise resources, including its Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Assist team, for proactive instance optimization, strategic planning and technical guidance.

“Our TAM and Assist resources feel like an extension of our team,” Siddiqui says. “They deeply understand our instance and how we run support, so their guidance fits the way we work and helps us deliver real impact.”

Combined with Canva’s focus on automating routine interactions, this partnership helps the company continuously optimize its support operations so customer specialists can dedicate more time to high-value conversations.

Using Zendesk App Builder, Canva has developed internal tools like a Routing Atlas app, which replaces manual comma-separated values (CSV) lookups for queue and trigger mapping, and an AI Eval Assistant, which allows specialists to review AI traces and submit structured feedback without leaving Zendesk.

“When a new use case comes up, App Builder enables us to build it right into the platform rather than standing up custom development,” Siddiqui says. “And our specialists never have to leave their workflow.”

By bringing these workflows into a single platform, Canva reduces context switching, streamlines operations, and extends Zendesk to meet its unique business needs without relying on heavy custom development.

Protecting customer data at scale

Canva takes privacy seriously. As the company scaled, so did the challenge of protecting customer data across more than one million support tickets each year. Its global support compliance team needed a way to safeguard sensitive information without slowing down service.

With Zendesk’s Advanced Data Privacy and Protection (ADPP), Canva automatically redacts sensitive information from tickets and call transcripts at scale, strengthening privacy while reducing manual review.

“ADPP does the first pass now, catching personally identifiable information automatically at a scale we never could manually,” says John Boyle, Senior Systems Engineer at Canva. “Specialists verify what’s been redacted instead of hunting for what hasn’t, so customer data is better protected and we get back to customers faster.”

Before implementing ADPP, Canva’s agents spent time manually reviewing each ticket. Today, that time has dropped by 69%, giving agents more time to focus on helping customers.

Turning operational data into action

Using Real-Time Monitoring dashboards and analytics, Canva’s teams can monitor operational performance, identify trends as they emerge, and quickly respond to changing customer needs. Those insights help customer experience leaders understand where friction exists, prioritize improvements, and measure the impact of changes over time.

“One of the great things about having Zendesk is it’s a system with a lot of data,” Capps says. “It’s not just passive data; it’s actually active data. We can use that to better understand customer resolution so that we know that we’ve actually solved problems not just for one customer, but for many.”

That operational intelligence also helps inform product development.

“Through the use of Zendesk and other tools, we’re able to keep track of inbound customer inquiries and feature requests,” Capps says. “That allows us to build upon our product to make our product continuously better.”

Canva uses Zendesk real-time monitoring dashboards (Explore) for day-to-day queue visibility, operational triage, and CSAT monitoring, especially since migrating to Omnichannel Routing. Dashboards are used to monitor SLA and observe queue backlog.

“Real-time visibility means our coaches manage queues in the moment,” says Siddiqui. “They see SLA and backlog shifting during the shift and adjust, rather than reacting after the fact.”

Real-time monitoring has helped the team at Canva tighten their queue routing and move towards full SLA coverage. Now, the team can see time in queue, SLA status for every ticket, and surface setup gaps.

A partnership built for long-term growth

Canva views Zendesk as more than a software provider. It’s a strategic service partner that helps the company continue scaling while maintaining a high-quality customer experience.

“What I love about partnering with Zendesk is that Zendesk has the same passion to make their product better as Canva does for our customers,” Capps says.