MaestroQA: Tails.com Boosts Support Agent Performance

Tails.com's Challenge:

Helping remote agents identify and overcome roadblocks to success

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Negative Implication:

Lost opportunities for improvement

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The Solution:

Closing the gap between CSAT and QA scores with Screen Capture from MaestroQA 

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Impact at Tails.com:

Reduced AHT + elevated agent confidence through actionable coaching and training

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Dog food subscription company Tails.com is revolutionizing pet nutrition. Developed by a team of veterinarians, nutritionists, engineers, and dog lovers, Tails.com makes it easy for pet owners to build customized meal plans that dogs love. Each month, millions of Tails.com’s meals are served to thousands of dogs across Europe.

To ensure each customer understands his or her dog’s diet, Tails.com offers personalized support via phone, email, and live chat. Customers appreciate the support, as evidenced by Tails.com’s “Excellent” rating on Trustpilot.com (based on more than 23,000 reviews).

Seeking to deliver on-brand customer experiences despite the increase in telework caused by COVID-19, Tails.com’s Quality team needed a better way to understand support agent performance and deliver more meaningful coaching while the team worked from home.

Challenge: Helping remote agents identify and overcome roadblocks to success

Coaching a growing team of support agents is challenging enough under normal circumstances. Add in a pandemic in which everyone works remotely, and the situation becomes even more complex.

“It’s difficult to know why some tasks take more time than others to complete,” said Daniel Jensen, Quality & Training Team Leader at Tails.com. “Unless you’re sitting in the same room with the agent, you just can’t tell what’s going on.” 

Tails.com had already built a robust knowledge base in Zendesk that was packed full of helpful customer-facing articles about dog health, nutrition, account FAQs, deliveries, and payment information. Yet, some agents still struggled to locate the resources that were necessary to accurately and efficiently answer customer questions on the fly.

Providing feedback in a constructive, empathetic way was also difficult in a remote setting.

For example, most agents would not think to ask for help in streamlining tasks that required 30 seconds or more to complete because "it's only 30 seconds." The Quality team had a hunch that this mentality was negatively impacting the business, but it lacked the tools to properly diagnose and resolve the situation.

Solution: Closing the gap between CSAT and QA scores with Screen Capture from MaestroQA 

Realizing the need for modern QA software that’s built for remote support teams, Tails.com turned to MaestroQA. 

MaestroQA’s Screen Capture feature provided Tails.com with a more scalable and compassionate approach to QA. Being able to visualize each agent’s steps gave graders important context and resulted in more in-depth coaching conversations.

“Seeing someone’s work eliminates flawed assumptions and helps us understand the process that they went through,” Jensen said. “This creates a more forgiving QA score, so agents aren’t penalized for things outside of their control.”

Screen Capture helped to give proper context to moments where agents hesitated, which made it easier for managers to provide helpful feedback.

“We’re able to see what goes on in a typical agent’s day in a big, new way,” Jensen said. “With Screen Capture, we can see individual agent behaviors that are causing them to work slower and make meaningful recommendations.”

Seeing agents work through processes and in the knowledge base surfaced new insights that elevated accountability at the leadership level. Missing and inaccurate help center content, inefficient processes, and broken systems were identified—and later remedied—by reviewing and discussing agent interactions with Screen Capture.

Result: Reducing AHT and elevating agent confidence by providing actionable coaching and training

Gaining transparency into each agent’s work day with MaestroQA accelerates the Quality team’s ability to develop new programs that boost efficiency. Case in point, Tails.com is implementing a new onboarding and training program to expedite how agents search for and find internal resources. Reducing each ticket’s time to resolution by even a few seconds could have a major impact on Tails.com’s customer experience. 

“Every second adds up when multiplied across the course of a day, week, month, and year—it’s a huge amount of time,” Jensen said. “It could be the difference of thousands of tickets.”

Empowering agents with better onboarding, training, and feedback translates into happier, more confident team members.

“Instead of just giving someone a hard number, I can have a more complete conversation with them about everything that factored into their QA score,” Jensen said. “We’re building agent confidence and rapport by coaching them on how to solve inquiries they struggled with.”

Jensen’s team leveraged insights from MaestroQA’s Screen Capture to help one agent get back on target and reduce her AHT by 50%. Watching the agent’s actual interactions with customers surfaced 17 specific opportunities for improvement that included everything from simple keyboard shortcuts to computer monitor configuration and support ticket navigation.

Tails.com’s support agents have bought into the new system, too, and actively rely on Screen Capture to initiate continuous improvement discussions with managers.

“Now agents come to us with tickets when they want advice on how they could have handled a situation better,” Jensen said. “Everything is so transparent, which has allowed us to have better conversations and uncover new opportunities for improvement.”


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