Aventus Will Knock Out Your Backlog In Just A Few Days
About Konscious
Konscious Keto is all about promoting a healthy lifestyle. In their own words, Konscious is here to “provide you with what you need to optimize your existence”. What a lovely sentiment. The way they approach this search for balance is by giving your body the nutrients it needs to improve metabolic condition and cognitive health in the form of nutritional and digestive supplements.
Industries
E-commerce, Fitness, Health
Rising Up To The Challenge
As Konscious launched “Emma Relief”, a new line of digestive supplements, ticket counts skyrocketed and we saw an increase of about 250% incoming volume in the span of just over a month! The product launch was a success, but we needed to make some adjustments in order to rise up to the rapidly increasing demand.
Just a few weeks prior, the CS team had been working with a more manageable volume of just under 300 backlogs. As of the fourth week of March, we were now looking at 3736 new tickets. To skip to the punchline, between the second week of February and the end of March, we scaled up the team to meet the challenge, redesigned our ticket allocation approach, optimized difficult ticket categories, and cleared up the 3800-item backlog (for a 373% increase in total tickets handled), all while reducing handle time to a record low average of 3 minutes.
Actions Taken
The main reason we were able to accomplish this responsive agility for our client was that everybody on the team had a clear understanding of the situation and what needed to be done. Everybody was on a mission and knew the game plan.
Concretely, though, we executed decisively on the following courses of action:
1. Projection and capacity planning: As we faced the rapidly growing ticket backlog, we ran the numbers to determine the optimal way to scale our Konscious support team. We looked at incoming frequency, handle time, and re-open ticket rate. From this we derived the amount of time we would need to tackle the issue and the human firepower we would need to do it.
2. Efficient modularity. Before the backlog, ticket allocation was done manually on the client’s side, introducing delays and suboptimal distribution into the ticket handling process. To fix this, we worked with Konscious leadership to come up with a more efficient inter-vendor strategy to streamline the allocation workflow.
3. Real-time agility. We also worked closely with our workforce management team to ensure distribution frequency was as efficient as possible and ticket movement was closely monitored.
4. Short time frame live monitoring. The team kept a close eye on the scoreboard at all times and spirits were kept high to maintain an agile pace.
5. Analysis of handle time drivers. We took a deep dive into the root causes of handle times to uncover bottlenecks and special attention categories. Agents were then coached on better and more efficient ways to handle these categories.
6. First-in-first-out (FIFO). Agents worked on the oldest items first in order to reduce customer wait times.
The Results
From our POV, the main point from this case study isn’t just about clearing up a giant pile of unanswered emails in record time (although that in itself wasn’t half bad, if we may say so ourselves). Rather, the learnings we want to keep from this episode have more to do with operational excellence. Mainly, these three things are worth highlighting for us:
1) Quantitative clarity: We want to be clear on the numbers–what we can and can’t do with a team of any given size, in a specific time frame, working with a particular client.
2) Find and clear out inefficiencies: By mapping the whole support process and talking it through with our clients, we are able to determine where improvements can be made to the largest effect.
3) Eye on the ball at all times: Our Workforce Management and Quality Assurance teams are not abstracted away in some control tower in the distance. They are right there on the field, side by side with our agents, being active participants of every development as it happens.
In this way, we are able to respond in a flexible and agile manner to emergent challenges.
We've been doing this ever since our founder and Chief Visionary, Josh Royal started the company nearly ten years ago, but every case like this brings new lessons and insights we then integrate into improvements to our service. If there’s anything we want you to walk away with from this case study is this: Aventus can handle volume spikes, large amounts of support tickets, and is proactive in finding ways to optimize and streamline processes. What do you think, worth a try?
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