Date Published:: July 12, 2023
Categories:: Success Stories

Butternut Box save 5+ hours a week over previous WFM with Surfboard

Written by:

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein , Founder & CEO

“We had experience with workforce management but needed something that could generate more meaningful time savings for our team.

The most important thing for us when looking for a new scheduling system was an aligned experience across all tools and software that we use. With Surfboard, we found that.”
— Liam Nooney, Customer Love Team Lead, Butternut Box

Butternut Box is a premium pet food subscription whose reach stretches across four geographies. Their product superiority is supported by their stellar customer service on phone, live-chat, email, and social media.

Butternut Box’s challenges

Competing within the lucrative pet food subscription market means that excellent service operations is a crucial step to becoming the most trusted brand for pet owners.

The Butternut Box Customer Love team had worked with spreadsheets and then another modern workforce management system, but they weren’t getting meaningful time savings from having everything integrate and visible in one place; from their forecasting to their shifts, round robins, intraday scheduling and time off requests.

How Surfboard helped Butternut Box

Butternut Box’s customer love team started using Surfboard in May 2023.

With a 4.8 star Trustpilot review and multiple channels including phone, chat, email and social, Butternut Box has scaled their team to over 60 agents in four geographies in order to respond to customers within minutes.

Integrating with existing tech

Connecting to Butternut Box’s existing tech stack of Dixa, CharlieHR, Slack and Google Calendar meant that Liam and his team leads have one view to know exactly who needs to be doing what and how that contributes to them meeting their service level targets.

Integration with CharlieHR means that their customer love team only has to book holiday and absence in one place, reducing admin time needed to consolidate bookings across multiple systems.

Planning shifts

Through shift planning which accommodates individual surfers’ shift preferences, Surfboard allows teams to have specific shifts for specific individuals while rotating the commonly used shifts through the team where needed.

Round robins are automated so that Butternut Box can always make sure to have enough people to cover their Saturday and Sunday inflow and avoid building up an email backlog.

With different shift plans for each team (UK, Benelux, South Africa and Poland), Butternut Box team leads have autonomy to schedule in unique ways depending on the working patterns, labour laws and skills of each team.

Intraday scheduling

Most of the magic for Butternut Box happens on the intraday schedule. Being able to visualise how many people they have scheduled against how many they people need for a wide array of activities is where they save the most time. They also take advantage of using separate activity plans for each team, allowing team leads to manage their own priorities and needs.

In addition to scheduling their inbound channels (phone, chat, email, Whatsapp, and social), they also have coverage requirements for operations, project time and outbound campaigns.

Surfboard calculates the number of people scheduled against the number of people required for each of these activities and automates the task allocation based on who is available, who is skilled to work on each task, and what the required coverage is.

“Our whole experience with Surfboard has been brilliant. Throughout the entire process, our customer success manager, Elva, has provided invaluable support, guiding both myself and the team through every aspect.

Since transitioning to Surfboard, we have achieved significant time savings of over 5 hours per week in scheduling. This translates to an impressive annual cost reduction of £4,165 in man hours. The impact of this switch on our operations has been truly transformative”
— Liam Nooney, Customer Love Team Lead, Butternut Box