How GetUpside Maintained Lightning-fast Response Times

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GetUpside is a cashback app that primarily gives cash back on gas, restaurants and groceries. We hosted a webinar to learn all about how their team maintains stellar efficiency metrics with increasing ticket volumes - and why their team cares so much about Tickets per 1000 Active Users. 

How is the GetUpside CX team set up?

We started the CX team with just two of us, but then we realized we needed more help. We looked at Upwork for freelance help and started building out a team of 35 agents as we got to a stage where we were growing 20% month-on-month.

How did you scale your team when you encountered a spike in CX ticket volume? Did you use a BPO or build in-house?

At that time, we had two options - either continue to build the team in-house, or to outsource our CX operations to a BPO.
We had built quite a great connection and rapport with the team of freelancers, and didn’t want to lose that. 

Additionally, we realized that a BPO wouldn’t be able to match an in-house team in terms of training effectiveness and cost.

The time it takes to train each agent at a BPO would be on average 4x that of doing it in-house. With our current set up, experienced agents help train the new hires. These agents are well-versed in the nuances of our product, and are able to pass on that knowledge to a new hire. A BPO would require us to start from square one again, first training the trainers, and then testing that newly trained agents were meeting the mark.

We figured that it would actually cost less to keep these freelancers on our payroll, but that might differ from company to company.

How did QA help your CX team save time and money?

By using QA, we were able to standardize tickets and how people were helped - this was huge from an efficiency perspective.

Having such a system in place also had a big shift on the team’s outlook as well - it gave them another reason to work harder because they wanted to see themselves do well, and QA helps us to show them where they currently stand.

At the end of the day, we figured that we could save these jobs that we had created instead of moving to a BPO. By keeping the team in-house and adding on a QA program, we were able to train our team to be way more efficient, and to do more with less!

What are the metrics that matter most to your CX team?

There are 4 metrics that matter most to our team:

Tickets per agent - QA helped us train to be more efficient, and increase our ticket/hour rate.

Time to Train - 1 week in-house vs 1 month at a BPO.

Response times - we wanted to maintain this number at under 24 hours.

Tickets per 1000 Active Users - we figured we could train our agents to deliver high quality customer interactions, to promote customer education and hence reduce our ticket volume.

First Contact Resolution - we want our agents to be thorough, so that customers only need to ask for help once.

Why is Tickets per 1000 Active Users such an important metric to your team?

This metric (sometimes called TPTAU) is a great proxy for our level of customer education. Barring any major product changes or a new release, this number should definitely go down over time as customers get more familiar with the product.

When you’re releasing a new update that’s particularly complicated, this number also tells your product team how they’ve done on the UI/UX side of things, as well as how well your product marketing team has done to communicate those changes.

For GetUpside, a low TPTAU rate means that the queue doesn’t get clogged up, and allows us to maintain our response time SLAs with our customers!

What this metric doesn’t show you is how much CX demand you’re actually receiving, so we usually plot this against our total ticket volume to get a sense of how much manpower we need to project to have moving forward.

How has QA helped with team engagement?

Our team is more engaged than ever. This is a team that has a 12-hour time difference with the main office. Ever since we’ve started QA, we’ve had more opportunities to bond and interact with the team, and we’ve noticed that more people are attending our optional weekly huddles than ever before.

QA also helped us save 35 jobs at the moment we were thinking of going the BPO route, back in 2018. Now, with the COVID-19 crisis and people pumping less gas and shopping less, QA scores have once again helped us to make the case for agents to be retained on the basis of their continued, strong performance.

How has QA helped with product and new feature launches?

New features and new promotions - QA has helped us to be really scientific in our new feature launches. You don’t want to go too far with CX for new features, and cover up for what is actually a bad new product. At the same time, CX needs to be there for our clients to create a controlled environment for the product to be tested in.

Main takeaways

QA has been a really important addition to our CX team. With the efficiency we’ve gained, we’ve been able to keep our team size stable even as ticket volume has increased. We’ve done that through a combination of agent training and customer education, with QA tracking our improvement at every step.