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

Butternut Box ditch WFM and save 5+ hours a week with Surfboard

Written by:

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein , Founder & CEO

Butternut Box saves over 5 hours per week on scheduling since ditching their previous WFM tool and implementing Surfboard, resulting in “a transformative impact on their service operations”.

Company: Butternut Box

Industry: Pet food subscription

Headquarters: London, UK

Integrations: Dixa, CharlieHR, Slack, Google Calendar

Geographies: 4

Team size: 60

The challenge

Competing within the lucrative pet food subscription market means that excellent service operations is an important ingredient (no pun intended) to becoming the most trusted brand for pet owners.

With a 4.9* Trustpilot review and multiple channels including phone, chat, e-mail and social, Butternut Box has scaled their team to over 60 agents in four geographies in order to respond to customers within minutes.

The Butternut Box customer love team was previously using another workforce management solution before migrating to Surfboard in 2023.

They chose to move to Surfboard for three main reasons:

A seamless integration into Dixa, powering customisable forecasts and adherence reporting
Integration with CharlieHR so 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
The ability to automate multiple intraday activity plans, so they could customise which schedule they use based on inflow volume and task distribution

“As a team, 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, we use multiple platforms on a daily basis and so a seamless integration was key. With Surfboard, we found that.” – Liam Nooney, Customer Love Team Lead, Butternut Box

Surfboard’s solution

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

The 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.

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.

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.

Accommodating 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.

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 ops, 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.

As is common with the implementation of a new platform, we encountered some initial challenges. However, the Surfboard team promptly addressed any issues and maintained open lines of communication, ensuring we were continuously informed of the progress made. Not once did we feel out of the loop with what was happening.

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