Offering an authentic experience and maintaining long-lasting relationships with its customers is a goal for subscription-based dog food company The Farmer’s Dog.
The company, which launched in 2016, looks to provide same-day support on nutrition, feeding and subscription questions and connecting with the customer’s veterinarian when necessary. It also sees itself as a source of health and care information for dog owners.
When it came to customer support, The Farmer’s Dog wanted to decrease average handle times and average tickets per customer, while increasing first contact resolution.
“Our focus is to optimize before scaling so every order, every delivery, every customer issue is handled in the most efficient way,” said Molly Garraway, senior manager of customer experience at The Farmer’s Dog. “This helps us improve agent handle times, first response time, process to resolution and ultimately customer satisfaction.”
The first step was to replace its voice platform. Limited options caused the company to transfer calls into voicemail so agents could open the right tool and aggregate customer information without asking callers to be on extended holds.
Without a robust voice channel, important conversations with prospects were being lost, and The Farmer’s Dog was unable to foster deeper relationships with subscription customers. Also, customer satisfaction and retention were reliant on each agent’s knowledge, critical thinking and resolution ability.
In order to solve its interactive voice response problem, The Farmer’s Dog partnered with UJET, letting it train and raise the efficiency of its agents and provide an enhanced service. UJET’s option website widget with AI integration was an integral part of The Farmer’s Dog decision.
The Farmer’s Dog customer experience team is lean so flexibility was important. The new IVR solution lets customers connect with agents, transfer customers quickly and provide a more efficient way to resolve issues.
“UJET allows my team to take matters into their own hands – every agent feels more empowered and capable of handling a customer’s questions or issues,” Garraway said.
Customer integration allowed the company to aggregate information before answering calls. Instead of directing them to voicemail, agents could now access customer information before picking up a call, reducing call times.
Having more interactions routed to IVR minimized back-and-forth email communication where long threads negatively impacted customer satisfaction.
The Farmer’s Dog has seen major improvements in customer operations, including faster issue resolution and a quartering of average handle time, from 20 minutes to five minutes.
Also, inbound call volume doubled, and 20% of customer interactions are coming from voice calls. Wait times decreased to under 45 seconds in 80% of cases, a significant decrease from the company’s previous queue through voicemail practice.
The Farmer’s Dog saw the number of interactions decrease by 50%, while inbound volume increased by 100%, with the number of tickets per customer decreasing and a reduction in repeat contact. Its customer experience team can now handle an influx of customer calls, and management is freed up to spend more time analyzing call data.