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Bloom & Wild improve forecasting accuracy by 33% with Surfboard to reduce BPO costs
Max Humberstone , Design
“I can’t imagine how we would do anything without Surfboard. As our team has grown, it’s grown with us. We’ve got multiple outsourced teams and Surfboard makes it really easy to manage them all in a democratic and simple way.”
— Isobel Mills, Lead Customer Delight Manager, Bloom & Wild
Bloom & Wild is a direct-to-consumer flower delivery company, offering prompt delivery and first-rate customer service if something’s not perfect.
Bloom & Wild’s challenges
Bloom & Wild encountered significant challenges due to its rapid growth of 160% in 2020 and the seasonal demands on its customer service team. The company faced heightened customer service requirements during peak periods such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, and Mother’s Day, exacerbated by the surge in flower demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. With 89% of retailers competing primarily on the basis of customer experience, Bloom & Wild’s need for flawless customer service delivery was essential — and urgent.
Bloom & Wild’s Customer Delight team is comprised of full-time, part-time, and outsourced associates. With this in mind, Bloom & Wild recognized the necessity for advanced planning and accurate forecasting to effectively meet service demands while efficiently managing costs. Prior to adopting Surfboard, the company relied on internal spreadsheets for forecasting and capacity planning, posing limitations on precision and efficiency. These outdated practices potentially put their customers at risk of switching retailers.
How Surfboard helped Bloom & Wild
Labour forecasting
Surfboard proved instrumental in enhancing Bloom & Wild’s forecasting capabilities. Through a combination of historical data and the Bloom & Wild growth model, Surfboard generated granular forecasts predicting the hourly and channel-specific ticket volumes the customer service team would receive. The forecasts heavily relied on delivery and order volumes, utilising data accessible through the Zendesk API.
Since implementing Surfboard, Bloom & Wild experienced a remarkable 33% improvement in forecasting performance. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), a metric measuring the disparity between Surfboard’s predicted ticket numbers and the actual tickets received, averaged at an impressive 12%.
Better management of outsourcing companies
Surfboard improved collaboration between Bloom & Wild and its outsourcing agencies by providing advanced notice of staffing requirements. This approach ensured that both parties were adequately prepared to handle peak times and special occasions.
Additionally, Surfboard worked with Bloom & Wild to formulate long-term (12-month) forecasts, which allowed outsourcing agencies to make preparations for critical periods, such as Mother’s Day, when the team required an additional 100 surfers. Surfboard also empowered Bloom & Wild to flexibly manage their service level agreement (SLA), enabling them to assess the tradeoff between quick responses and cost and identify the optimal balance for efficient operations.
“Forecasting for our team was easily the most time consuming task and amongst a year of extraordinary growth became increasingly complex. Surfboard has made this process much quicker and more efficient by providing a solution that is both compatible with our existing processes and is evolving to our ever changing needs.”
— Caitlin Macrae, Customer Delight Manager, Bloom & Wild
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If you’re an organisation like Bloom & Wild and you’re looking to improve forecasting accuracy, get started today with Surfboard.
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