Date Published:: March 24, 2023
Categories:: Success Stories

Ophelos save time scheduling with Surfboard

Written by:

Shannon Ashley , Design lead

“I love how intuitive Surfboard is, and how it reduces the amount of time I spend scheduling”
— Shannon, Customer Operations Team Lead, Ophelos

Ophelos are a new kind of debt collection agency working hard to de-stigmatise the negativity around debt collection. They want to put the feelings of their customers and their businesses first, encouraging engagement to prevent people ignoring their debts and ultimately to improve their financial health.

For Ophelos, it’s crucial to have a system that treats their tight-knit support team with compassion — so they can pass that compassion on to their customers.

Ophelos’ challenges

Aimed at improving financial health, Ophelos requires effective coverage across diverse contact channels for both inbound and outbound communications. Ophelos faced significant challenges due to the absence of a scheduling tool. Initially, they managed with a small team, manually writing down weekly schedules and rotating them across team members.

This method lacked the flexibility and visibility needed for efficient channel staffing, impacting their ability to provide consistent and compassionate customer support.

How Surfboard helped Ophelos

Promoting flexibility

Surfboard’s introduction brought a transformative change to Ophelos’ operations — and earned them a Trust Pilot rating of 4.5 stars. By automating scheduling, Surfboard saved the team considerable time and effort, integrating seamlessly with their time-off system to eliminate manual schedule adjustments. This automation provided much-needed flexibility, enhancing customer satisfaction through more effective channel coverage.

Connecting their team

Through comprehensive visibility into daily tasks and channel staffing, Surfboard helped the Ophelos support team to ensure no customer inquiries were overlooked, in line with their commitment to responsive and empathetic service.

The integration with Slack furthered this by promoting transparency and accountability, core values of Ophelos. This integration meant that team members received notifications, messages, and shift change reminders directly within Slack– creating a more connected and informed team environment.

“I love how intuitive it is. I love being able to set priorities of channels and having a clear overview of the days and weeks.”
— Shannon, Customer Operations Team Lead, Ophelos

Human-centred support

Surfboard’s human-centred approach resonated deeply with Ophelos’ ethos of compassion – they believe that “compassion is not a luxury”.

A combination of Ophelos’ dedication to treating customers with understanding and Surfboard’s mission to make work more humane created an ideal partnership. Surfboard’s system allowed Ophelos to extend the same level of compassion and consideration to their support team, fostering a positive and empathetic workplace culture that directly translated into higher quality customer interactions.

“There has definitely been a reduction in the amount of time I use for scheduling On Monday mornings, I’ll usually glance at the week ahead, and only need to make ad-hoc changes depending on company updates. I’ve saved a good few hours a week, at least.”
— Shannon, Customer Operations Team Lead, Ophelos