Why Freshly Ditched Spreadsheets To Get To 96% CSAT

Freshly provides differentiating customer support. They innovate in proactive outreach, in the channels upon which they support customers, and in how they follow up after support interactions. They are also on the cutting edge of omnichannel quality assurance in terms of the processes and technology that they have in place.  

They do all of this because they want to provide really fantastic customer experiences, and it’s working. Freshly now boasts a consistent 96% customer satisfaction. Ben Segal, Senior Manager of Customer Service Excellence, tells us how they did it:

The Shift In Customer Expectations

The overall customer expectation has increased. Good support is expected. It's the bad support, or the really fantastic support, that makes you memorable or separates you. We really strive to provide fantastic, memorable customer experience, not just the good support.

But agents jobs have become increasingly difficult. They’re maintaining conversations across so many channels now. When I started back in 2016, we implemented a quality assurance program here at Freshly, but we were using spreadsheets and online survey tools to kind of piece-meal it together as best we could. It was a solid check, but it wasn't ideal for scaling a customer support team.

The Early Days Of Customer Service Quality Assurance At Freshly

We had a small team. We were about fifteen at the time. We're now over sixty. And so the idea of working through these, Google Sheets and online survey tools, just wasn't ideal for scaling a quality QA program. And if you're going to do QA, do it right.

Some of the downfalls of using Sheets and online survey tools for QA is that it's super manual. So you're going to be looking at anywhere from one to two percent of your overall contacts being monitored, where you really want to shoot for a confidence level of at least five percent to know that you're actually monitoring the quality.

As Freshly began to grow, we were noticing the contact volume continued to increase and increase, and the number of monitors we were able to do in that old-school way of doing it just wasn't enough. We were finding that contacts being monitored were sometimes two weeks or three weeks old.

Why Spreadsheets Didn’t Do The Trick

If you're looking at contacts that are really too old to be relevant to coach, then you're not going to be able to address the problems that are going on in real time. And every minute that you let go by without this real-time coaching, you're allowing for more negative customer interactions. And those are the ones that people are going to remember, those bad interactions.

So as we were looking for a tool to help us scale, there were a few things we were looking for. We wanted it to be a seamless interface. We wanted the grader to be able to see the ticket and the rubric at the same time. So they could, in real time, be looking at a ticket and digging into these rubrics that we had built out, and also being able to annotate that – to actually look into an interaction and highlight a specific issue, and then relate that to a specific question in the rubric and say, “Oh you didn't do this well, and here's exactly why.” It's not left up for interpretation.

The other factor was, what do the agents see on the other end of it? What does coaching look like for them? Are they able to digest this feedback and actually use it? That was super key as well.

Outcomes: How To Improve CSAT, How To Scale Quality, How To Coach Agents

Once we instituted a QA program, even though it was in Sheets and online survey tools, our CSAT was in the high eighties. We were playing around eight-six, eighty-seven percent. Sometimes we would touch ninety. Really once we scaled with MaestroQA and we had much more visibility into the overall quality of the contacts, we're now at a consistent ninety-six percent CSAT.

We’re also scaling the customer service quality assurance program. We're now up to close to five percent of overall contacts that are being monitored, and the amount of time it takes to complete a QA monitor has dramatically decreased.

The coaching experience is also great for agents, there's even dashboards built in, and that has been incredibly helpful. There isn't that negative stigma around the QA program anymore because it's so transparent.