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Lick reduces planning time by 75% with Surfboard
Max Humberstone , Design
Lick uses Surfboard to generate automated schedules, reducing time spent on planning and improving service levels
Lick is a direct to consumer home decor provider, selling designer wall paint and wallpaper online.
Featured in design magazines and with a strong social media following, Lick balances providing excellent service to its network decorators and customers across email, WhatsApp and social media.
Lick has an internal customer experience team of 8 people balancing providing customer support (responding to queries) and customer success (providing styling advice). They divide tickets by level of urgency.
Reducing scheduling time using Surfboard
Lick utilises Surfboard’s automated schedule generation resulting in a 75% reduction in time spent on planning.
With the end-to-end process covering forecasting, staffing requirements and rota creation, Surfboard captures absences and all other requisite data through integration so they can create the correct daily schedule enabling Lick to balance responding to urgent tickets in the mornings, support tickets at all times and success tickets at the right times throughout the day with little manual intervention.
Surfboard complements the schedules with heatmaps so that if any manual changes are made to the schedule, the implications on service levels are clear. This makes decision making a lot easier and reduces the number of siloes where data sits.
Lick has a mix of part-time and full-time staff, using Surfboard to optimise the best times to enhance service performance with part-timers. In addition, their team spends time on 1:1s, team meetings training and development which are built into Surfboard schedules.
Surfboard has saved me an enormous amount of time in scheduling. Knowing that our channels will be covered appropriately with the right surfers at the right time is invaluable to us. We’ll always have to react to unexpected situations that crop up throughout the day but with Surfboard’s scheduling capabilities, I can make the right decisions for my team and my customers.
Rose Goodbody, Decorator Success Manager, Lick Home
Improving service levels
Lick has a variability of when tickets come in and the types of tickets. With different target response times for support vs. success and even faster response times for urgent tickets, Surfboard manages the different ticket groups to automatically prioritise different tickets.
Surfboard’s handling of the end-to-end process from forecasting tickets to handling activity scheduling means Lick always has the right people online at the right time in the best way to navigate seasonal peaks and troughs.
My team needs to trust our forecast behind their schedule because it informs when they work and what they work on. Thanks to Surfboard, our surfers know that they’re on a channel for a reason and as a result, our SLAs and KPIs have improved massively and all without the headache of having to draw up a rota on a Google Sheet.
Rose Goodbody, Decorator Success Manager, Lick Home
More granular visibility into metrics
In addition to forecasting and scheduling, the Surfboard dashboard also provides service performance retro information and metrics on a per agent level. Lick can now see how they have performed against target response times and individual metrics of tickets per hour and average handle time per agent so they can tailor their coaching efforts.