In the first article of this series, we gave you a sneak peek at how our Customer Support (CS)  team is organised, how we quickly scaled to deliver high customer satisfaction, and how our partnership with Pontica Solutions allowed us to rise to the challenges of the last two years. In this second entry, we further explain how our CS team divides tasks with our partner Pontica Solutions and how we work together to manage the customer feedback loop and turn insights into product improvements.

Read on as we go deeper into what it’s like to be on the receiving end of customer requests and give you an insider view of the launch of innovative features.

No request left behind

In today’s economy of services, we rely on many digital platforms in our everyday lives. Whether it’s to book a flight at the best price, find accommodation for the holidays, or get groceries delivered to our homes, platforms have become our go-to to make our lives easier. However, this doesn’t mean human interactions have disappeared along the way. We still find ourselves reaching out to Customer Support when something goes unexpected. As individual users, issues encountered may seem few but when you put yourself in the shoes of a CS team working for a platform with millions of users, it amounts to thousands of daily requests.

We are committed to treating every request with the same level of care and professionalism.

At Stuart, we currently power millions of deliveries a year across six countries and 150 cities. This means our Customer Support team is dealing daily with many problem-solving challenges to make sure our clients can power their deliveries in minutes and delight their customers with a smooth delivery experience. We are committed to treating every request with the same level of care and professionalism. At the same time, we want to build an even better product from the feedback we receive. To handle these tasks simultaneously, we work hand-in-hand with our partner Pontica Solutions, which helped us ramp up our Support services amid growing needs during the Covid-19 pandemic when we experienced peaks in demand.

Stuart x Pontica Solutions: a CS success story

In just four months, Stuart’s and Pontica’s joint efforts allowed us to onboard hundreds of Support specialists and provide training in four languages. Today, Support agents working in Pontica’s three sites—Sofia, Varna and Kraków—are the first point of contact for our clients who encounter issues. On top of that, Pontica Solutions also handle Live Operations—the monitoring of real-time delivery flows.

Stuart’s partnership with Pontica over the last two years is a real success story and an award-winning one! To maintain our customer service excellence and strengthen our relationship with Pontica Solutions, our CS team at Stuart plans recurrent field visits to the Support sites. During on-site visits, we conduct shadowing sessions to oversee in real-time how agents deliver support to clients and courier partners. On the one hand, receiving live feedback from Pontica’s agents facilitates the ability of Stuart’s global CS team to refine the processes and responses developed. On the other hand, it allows us to build a stronger bond with our partners at Pontica, involve them more in the process of developing new appropriate answers for clients and couriers, and empower agents on the first line of our customer service. 

Gathering feedback: the key to continuous improvement

As we started to outsource part of our support tasks to Pontica Solutions, our global CS team in Barcelona was able to free up time to build our programs Client Experience and Partner Experience. These latter are key to Stuart’s continued product improvement as the project specialists in these teams conduct analysis of live chats to identify recurring challenges and share user feedback with our Product team. Their analytic skills are enabling us to resolve future issues more efficiently and more rapidly; today the average time to resolve inquiries is only 11 minutes for clients and 2.6 minutes for couriers.

At Stuart, we believe in product iteration based on constant customer feedback.

The development of our two programs is fundamental for the future of Stuart’s. We’re proud to have a cutting-edge product, developed by some of Europe’s best tech talents. To remain the best delivery player to partner with for businesses and couriers alike, we believe in product iteration based on constant customer feedback. Since March 2021, we’ve been carefully listening to what our clients and courier partners say about our products and services. As we gain more and more first-hand insights, we’re able to deliver new exciting projects.

Human touch and smarter chatbots

In the first two quarters of 2022, we’ve been pursuing our automation efforts to resolve repetitive queries faster. We have increased the number of chatbots available in each market and we have constantly improved our user experience by monitoring customer feedback. Something as simple as moving a button up or down a few centimetres for greater visibility is the result of a thorough data analysis that concluded it was the user’s preferred position. 

Another successful project that we launched was the update of our tone of voice guidelines. We dropped outdated greetings and formalities and adopted a warmer and more personal tone that generates better engagement with our users. At the same time, Stuart’s CS Training team delivered soft skill workshops to the Client Experience team over the course of three weeks. Overall, we’ve seen a reduction of 3% in client dissatisfaction thanks to this soft skill upskilling program. 

Finally, we have been building an even stronger customer feedback database. Insights from the regular surveys we send to our clients and couriers partners are now automatically processed and easily accessible on our data analysis boards. Although the most complex parts of customer feedback still need to be processed and analysed manually, we estimate that this new process has successfully saved people in the Quality team about four hours a month.

Exciting projects ahead

With over six months to go until the end of 2022, we are proud to have already delivered key projects to maintain an optimised customer experience for our customers and courier partners. As we look ahead, we’re going to center our efforts around three main goals: keep on reducing the time to request support for our customers, refine our tone of voice guidelines, and develop even more automation to classify the type of queries our CS agents solve on a daily basis. These are our guiding stars for the months to come as we look ahead to exciting new projects!

 

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