Infrascale - Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation

Company: Infrascale, Reston, VA
Company Description: Infrascale provides comprehensive, cloud-based data protection by delivering industry-leading backup and disaster recovery solutions. Combining intelligent software with the power of the cloud, Infrascale removes the barriers and complexity of secure, offsite data storage and standby infrastructure for real-time disaster recovery.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Infrascale Technical Support Team

The Infrascale Technical Support team has been a critical factor in our success over the years and we are exceptionally proud of the work they do to support our customers. While we have faced significant hurdles in the past, we are very proud of our accomplishments. Going into 2020, it was apparent that we needed to make some changes. Our team was consistently not hitting our support SLAs, missing chats/calls from customers, and all-around underperforming on our KPIs. We were being told by customers “You’re too hard to get a hold of” or “You never follow-up” and it was time to push the reset button. While most would have looked at this and thrown more head count at the issues, we took a different approach. We said: let’s treat this as if we were contractors asked to build a technical support team from scratch; what would we need to be successful? Our theory: this was a process problem, not a staffing problem. As we would quickly see, process change was exactly what was needed, and although tough at times, the results were fast and overwhelmingly positive.

Outline the team's achievements since July 1 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):

Infrascale Technical Support has made remarkable changes over the last year. After careful review and analysis of our support team and processes, we did the following:

-Increase efficiency: Made the team more effective and able to handle the volume of inquiries by changing the hours of our chat and phone support. We analyzed our historical data for when requests arrived, and via which channel, leading to optimization of channel support. We built a precise model to forecast when inquiries would come in, and changed our staffing schedules to coincide with peak times.

-Better resource utilization: Cross-trained all agents on all products, whereas they had been siloed by product type prior. By training the team on all the products, we more effectively utilize the workforce and allow for more channel coverage. Finally, we combined our queues, making sure the team was following a “first in, first out” methodology, for any tickets that weren’t P1 Critical.

-Smarter workflow: Created a “pick up the phone first” policy, where an agent’s first action (for a new ticket), is to immediately call the customer back. By calling back immediately, our team can initiate a remote sessions to troubleshoot, leading to faster resolution times.

-Increased accountability: Instituted and empowered our agents to own the outcome by ensuring that the same agent that answers the ticket, sees it through to completion. This cut back on unnecessary transferring for customers, with added benefit of resolution time and customer frustration (that was true with transfer).

Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the team's past performance (up to 250 words):

Our theory turned out to be correct, our problems were not solvable by hiring more staff, they would be more quickly resolved with renewed focus on the fundamentals of what makes a support experience great. Having the staffing we needed, we needed to align KPIs and processes. The results from the changes made have been astounding and fast! Over the course of 6 months, we improved our overall time to resolution by 6%, tickets closed within first 24 hours by 36%, first response by 22%, we’ve made huge improvements on our chat and phone efficiency and most importantly, our CSAT has never been higher. The same customers that previously gave us negative feedback have since reached out to us, unsolicited, and asked us what we did, as they have noticed how fantastic our technical support team has become. While change is never easy, the team embraced these new changes and philosophies whole heartedly and the turnaround has been nothing short of phenomenal.