Executive Summary

Material Security, a productivity suite security company, needed a support solution that could scale without sacrificing their personalized approach to customer support.

After evaluating several support solutions including Zendesk & Hubspot Service Hub, Material chose Pylon for its flexibility, modern interface, and ability to handle multi-channel support seamlessly.

"After working extensively with industry standard big-box ticketing systems, it became glaringly obvious that a ticketing tool could be done better. I knew that I needed a tool that was highly flexible and customizable but didn't knew that a tool like that actually existed until I encountered Pylon."

 Esther Disbot, Head of Product Support at Material Security

About Esther Disbot

As Head of Product Support at Material Security, Esther Disbot brings over 15 years of technical support expertise. Her career spans from early-stage startups to industry giants like Twilio, where she served on the global support leadership team. This breadth of experience, particularly with enterprise support tools, gives her unique insight into what makes a support system truly effective at scale.

Challenges

Material Security prides itself on offering a high-touch, personalized approach to customer support. Any new solution needed to ensure that this level of service remained intact as the company expanded

When Esther joined Material Security, the company relied heavily on Slack to manage customer support. As Esther states below, this is not scalable without proper tooling.

"When I first joined Material Security, we were primarily managing our customer support within Slack. Slack is not meant to be a support ticketing platform and is nearly impossible to manage as such."

 Esther Disbot, Head of Product Support at Material Security

To help manage their many Slack channels, Material tried implementing tools to help but they had usability issues. Resulting in poor experiences for their support engineers and a degraded experience for their customers.

Beyond usability, Material also needed a tool that could seamlessly integrate with Material’s existing systems, including HubSpot and Linear.

Why not use legacy support tools like Zendesk?

Given her prior experience at many other companies, Esther was familiar with legacy support tools like Zendesk, Salesforce and Hubspot. However, she deliberately chose to avoid these legacy solutions due to their complexity and rigidity.

"With legacy support tools, you really need a dedicated Ops team to manage and own the implementation and ongoing maintenance. Additionally, when you want to make changes beyond the initial implementation, it's almost easier to just rip the whole thing down and rebuild it from the ground up. With Pylon, you don't need to rip anything out and rebuild it, it's so flexible that it can easily keep up with the fluctuating demands of the business."

 Esther Disbot, Head of Product Support at Material Security

Additionally, legacy tool's lack of native Slack integrations meant that Material Security’s primary support channel would not be seamlessly incorporated into the workflow. Instead of adapting their processes to fit the limitations of a legacy system, Esther sought a tool that could evolve with the team’s needs—one that was both flexible and easy to implement.

How does Pylon address these challenges?

After evaluating multiple solutions, Material Security chose Pylon for its:

1. Modern UI + UX

"Pylon is best-in-class when it comes to usability. More and more companies are aligning their Support teams to their Engineering teams and Pylon makes it so easy to align with Engineering teams by offering a native Linear integration as well as encourages following industry standard frameworks, like a Kanban board to manage tickets within Pylon."

 Esther Disbot, Head of Product Support at Material Security

Pylon's Kanban board makes it easy for support teams to see the status of any ticket. Tickets will automatically be categorized into buckets such as New, Waiting on You, Waiting on Customer, or Waiting on Engineering. This is done either manually or automatically with Pylon's AI tools.

2. Flexible + Customizable Platform

Pylon’s flexibility was a key factor in their decision, offering extensive customization that allowed the team to shape the platform to fit their needs.

One of the standout features was Pylon’s ability to tailor workflows and views to match how Material Security operated. Esther appreciated how easily Pylon could be configured without requiring a dedicated admin team. She quickly set up automation triggers to streamline ticket assignments, ensuring that cases were routed efficiently.

3. Multi-channel Support

Unlike Zendesk and other legacy tools, which lack built-in Slack support, Pylon natively integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Email, and In-App Chat. This allows Material Security to meet customers where they were already communicating, improving response times and engagement.

"Our customers love our conversational approach to the support experience. 90% of our customers prefer to receive support via Slack because it's so embedded in their everyday workflows. Pylon's tool made it possible for us to continue to offer Slack support in an efficient and flexible manner but it also made it possible for our customers to stay in their preferred communication platform of choice when they need to ask for help."

 Esther Disbot, Head of Product Support at Material Security

Results: Efficiency, Collaboration, and Employee Satisfaction

Since adopting Pylon, Material Security has reduced resolution times, streamlined bug tracking through Linear, and gained access to deeper reporting and analytics. The support team has seen improved employee sentiment, with their Support Engineers being able to focus on meaningful work supporting customers rather than managing inefficient processes and tools. Additionally, Pylon’s seamless engineering integrations have enhanced cross-functional collaboration, ensuring better visibility across teams.

"In order to provide a great customer experience, you need satisfied Support Engineers. With legacy support tools, you'll often find that employees hyper focus on how inefficient the tool is rather than the experience they're providing to customers. With Pylon, not only are our Support Engineers able to provide a great customer experience but their satisfaction sentiment has improved." 

Esther Disbot, Head of Product Support at Material Security