Company: Hometree provides insurance in boiler protection to UK households with transparent pricing, an easy claim process and speedy fixes.

Hometree’s challenges

Scheduling complexities

Hometree operates in the boiler insurance space, meaning that when a customer calls to make a claim, it’s urgent. High service levels attainment is critical as a customer service metric and their team works across four channels: phone, live chat, email and social media.

Prior to Surfboard, Hometree was scheduling on a number of spreadsheets. With three different managers organising team rotas, their spreadsheets became increasingly difficult to manage with a plethora of comments and version control issues.

Fairness and efficiency

Fairness is something that’s extremely important to managers at Hometree. When looking at workforce management solutions, Surfboard’s mission of making work more human stayed with Pranjal, Hometree’s Chief Commercial Officer.

They had looked at other scheduling software but didn’t want something that just optimises for resource allocation. With spreadsheets, they were manually having to eyeball whether shifts and tasks to ensure a fair allocation across the team beyond just coverage against channel requirements.

How Surfboard helped Hometree

Streamlining scheduling operations

Hometree moved their scheduling from spreadsheets to Surfboard in 2022.

With the ability to manage different shift rotations so that Hometree could respond to any customer emergency with 24/7 coverage, Hometree was immediately able to streamline their support operations and scheduling through connecting Surfboard’s forecasting to schedules.

Beyond inbound customer support, Hometree’s team also has scheduled team meetings through Google Calendar which are automatically synced into Surfboard schedules. They use Bamboo HR for booking time off (holidays, sickness, parental leave) and link their Surfboard account directly to Bamboo so that schedules can automatically account for who is off and can’t be scheduled.

Widening coverage with flexible schedules

Impressed with the results and automations around Surfboard scheduling, Hometree began exploring the wider range of features on offer.

These included forecast adjustments to accommodate unforeseen peaks in ticket volumes as well as time and attendance reporting. According to Pranjal, “being able to connect multiple systems in one place is extremely important for us and we couldn’t facilitate this on spreadsheets”.

With Surfboard shift patterns, Hometree is also able to automate timezone management.

To cover their 24/7 customer demands, they use a follow the sun model – working with teams across multiple timezones.

Improving operations and boosting team morale

The simplicity and cleanliness of the user interface was an important differentiator for the Hometree team when shopping for software.

With Surfboard powering Hometree’s team orchestration, they have become the highest-rated boiler insurance provider on Trustpilot, with an industry-leading score of 4.7 stars.

With agent well being in mind, Hometree makes sure they customise their agent break windows to get lunch breaks at the right time – so the team can get a well-deserved break without leaving support channels inadequately covered as a result.

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