Date Published:: November 19, 2021
Categories:: Success Stories

Freshly Cosmetics plan for peaks with Surfboard

Written by:

Max Humberstone , Design

“Surfboard helps us organise ourselves better, cover all our responsibilities and provide better service to our customers.”
— Marina Romero, Customer Love Manager, Freshly Cosmetics

Freshly Cosmetics is an online provider of natural beauty products. Operating in five countries, Freshly’s customer love team responds to questions over the phone, email, chat, and social media.

Freshly’s challenges

Freshly, a customer-centric company operating in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and the UK, faced challenges in efficiently managing its internal Customer Love team made up of 30 members. One of the major hurdles was ensuring that team members had ample time for non-service related projects while also meeting the demands of various service channels. This prompted Freshly to seek solutions for automated forecasting and fair scheduling to enhance overall team productivity.

How Surfboard helped Freshly

Optimising shift scheduling

Freshly partnered with Surfboard to address its challenges and optimise team scheduling. By inputting the skills and availability of different team members into Surfboard’s system, Freshly received weekly schedules empowered by Surfboard forecasts. This ensured that Freshly always had an adequate number of staff to cover their channels, while also maintaining fairness in the distribution of workload among employees.

Surfboard’s schedules not only met service requirements but also allowed the customer love team to allocate sufficient time for non-service related projects. The utilisation of Surfboard’s “20% time” feature further contributed to a balanced work structure.

Labour forecasting

Like a lot of e-commerce companies, Freshly sees huge peaks every year around Black Friday. In preparation for increased customer demands, Freshly collaborated with Surfboard to develop proactive schedules and forecasting. Surfboard adapted to Freshly’s growth model, adjusted forecasts and schedules, and guaranteed that Freshly had a well-staffed team to provide exceptional service during this critical period.

The support provided by Surfboard significantly reduced the time spent on scheduling and forecasting, offering a streamlined approach to team planning in what would typically be a chaotic month for Freshly’s Customer Love team.

“We had a larger team supporting us in Customer Love during Black Friday in order to assist our customers efficiently and quickly. Surfboard adapted schedules accordingly, as well as managing the new tasks that needed to be organised.

Schedules were created in record time taking all the alterations into account. Additionally, we used to manually manage scheduling ourselves and now Surfboard manages most of it, saving us time in both creating and making changes.”
— Marina Romero, Customer Love Manager, Freshly Cosmetics