Engage, Manage, & Optimize External Talent
For more than 20 years, Beeline has led the extended workforce industry. Thanks to their intelligence-driven platform, they transform how businesses engage, manage, and optimize external talent. With a data set encompassing more than 30 million workers and over $700 billion in talent spend, Beeline solves complexities of managing the modern workforce.
Brannon Shea, Director of Global Support Services, runs a support organization that is the first touchpoint for customers across all parts of the business. Jeremy Millrood, Director of Training and Support, leads the training process for support agents. Their teams work together to handle support inquiries from several personas in the extended workforce space, including client users, suppliers, and candidates.
Being in hyper growth mode, Beeline continues to emphasize customer experience, without sacrificing efficient processes. The key focuses of Beeline’s support organization are customer satisfaction, efficiency, and speed to revenue.
Challenges– Brannon Shea, Director of Global Support ServicesCustomer satisfaction, efficiency, and speed to revenue are tied together with how happy customers are and how quickly they’re onboarded and using the tool. We were doing an ok job of that before, but we needed something to really beef up our ability to service customers effectively.
Overcoming Organizational Change
Beeline was challenged with reducing solution times, improving customer satisfaction, and providing for faster ramp up times for support agents. As Beeline’s customer base grew, they realized there was an urgent need for tools that would empower their customers, while enabling support agents to work more efficiently.
In 2017, Beeline had just completed an acquisition and was running two separate support teams in different countries. Two years later, Beeline consolidated their support teams into one organization.
Because the teams followed different processes and were trained on different products, the consolidation created a sense of confusion and in some cases agents were taking too long to resolve tickets. Leadership quickly realized if something wasn’t done to address the core issue, it would ultimately impact customer satisfaction.
As the leader of support, Brannon was focused on finding a scalable solution that would help his team get the right answers to customers quickly so that they could focus their time on business-critical requests.
– Brannon Shea, Director of Global Support ServicesWith resource constraints and an inability to add headcount, we had to innovate. We needed a solution that enabled end users to go to the website and get answers quickly and effectively.
Additionally, Beeline looked to develop a homegrown bot. Unfortunately, it lacked a knowledge base interface. Without the ability to pull relevant knowledge articles into the chat, agents had to respond to each inquiry manually. This led to support queues being backed up with simple requests that could have been handled without agent intervention.
SolutionEfficient, Effective Support
Beeline uses both Solve and Assist to help customers find answers instantly while enabling agents with relevant answers to cases without leaving their help desk.
– Jeremy Millrood, Director of Training and SupportIf we look at what it costs our team to do a two week sprint to create something that would solve our efficiency problems, Forethought is a no-brainer. The ROI speaks for itself.
Solving More Cases, Faster
With Solve, Beeline customers received answers to their support questions instantly.
With about 70% of support calls relating to password resets, and the other 30% relating to timesheets and general site navigation, these types of questions could be easily automated without the need for a live agent.
By automatically surfacing help center resources like knowledge articles, Solve enables customers to self-serve. These self-serve capabilities lead to reduced case volumes and happier customers. Solve delivers consistent and personalized experiences across a large volume of support tickets, allowing Beeline agents to focus their time on more complex support issues.
Reducing Agent Ramp Time
Beeline uses Assist to surface relevant knowledge articles, past cases, macros, and personal notes right within Beeline agents’ help desk. For newer agents, having the right resources at their fingertips makes answering tickets more efficient.
Agents can attach relevant help center articles to cases, and find similar past tickets to include in their responses. Assist also helps agents maintain personalization in support conversations, without sacrificing speed. By applying macros with placeholder text on the ticket, agents have a template with relevant information that they can easily personalize to each customer.
Results– Jeremy Millrood, Director of Training and SupportSince implementing Assist, team members are able to work faster and provide more thorough answers than ever before. This has translated into faster resolution times, improved customer satisfaction ratings and less ramp up time needed for new support agents.
Deflecting Tickets for Faster Resolution
Since implementing Solve, ticket volume has dropped by about 100 tickets per month, and call volume by 400. Beeline had a goal of 10-15% deflection when the team first evaluated Forethought. Now, they’ve achieved over 50% deflection.
– Brannon Shea, Director of Global Support ServicesWith Assist, team members are able to work faster and provide more thorough answers than ever before. This has translated into higher faster resolution times, improved customer satisfaction ratings and less ramp up time needed for new support agents.
With Assist, support agents are significantly more productive. They have decreased time to first response by 24.3%, time to resolution by 52.2%, and time in between case responses by 32%.
- +50% deflection
- 24.3% decrease in first response time
- 52.2% decrease in time to resolution
- 32% reduction in time between case responses
Looking Ahead
In the near future, Beeline plans to use Solve throughout its entire platform to achieve the same deflection rates it does within the help center. Beeline also plans to grow the footprint of Assist across more parts of their Customer Success organization with a goal of ensuring clients and partners receive seamless customer experiences.
– Jeremy Millrood, Director of Training and SupportWe’ve gained a lot of credibility because of Forethought. Internally, we’re taken very seriously when we bring a new piece of technology into evaluation. Because of the success we’ve seen with Forethought, we have a great track record of bringing on new technology partners that show clear ROI.
