Date Published:: May 3, 2022
Categories:: Success Stories

Lick reduces planning time by 75% with Surfboard

Written by:

Max Humberstone , Design

“Streamlining with Surfboard saves me time in scheduling, while improving our SLAs and KPIs.”
— Rose Goodbody, Decorator Success Manager, Lick Home

Lick is a prominent direct-to-consumer home decor provider known for its designer wall paint and wallpaper, faced challenges in managing its customer experience team efficiently.

Lick’s challenges

With a strong presence in design magazines and social media, Lick had to balance providing top-notch service to both network decorators and customers across various communication channels, including email, WhatsApp, and social media.

With the annual cost of customers switching retailers due to poor service estimated to be $1.6 trillion across the retail industry, each customer support ticket was important.

Lick’s internal customer experience team of 8 individuals had the critical task of handling customer support and success, categorising these tickets by urgency levels. This division of responsibilities required careful planning and execution to maintain service excellence.

How Surfboard helped Lick

Reducing scheduling time using Surfboard

To address the challenges, Lick turned to Surfboard. Surfboard’s scheduling features helped Lick significantly reduce the time spent on planning schedules- by 75%. The end-to-end process, covering forecasting, staffing requirements, and rota creation, became streamlined. Surfboard integrated data, capturing absences and other essential information, allowing Lick to generate accurate daily schedules with minimal manual intervention.

Surfboard’s automated scheduling complemented Lick’s workflow by providing heatmaps, offering clear insights into the implications of manual changes on service levels. This enhancement simplified decision-making processes and minimised data silos. Lick, with a mix of part-time and full-time staff, optimised service performance by identifying the best times for part-timers. Surfboard’s schedules accommodated 1:1s, team meetings, training, and development activities, ensuring a holistic approach to workforce management.

Improving service levels

Lick faced variability in ticket influx and diverse ticket types, each requiring different response times. Surfboard efficiently managed this variability by automatically prioritising different ticket categories based on urgency.

Handling the entire process from ticket forecasting to activity scheduling, Surfboard ensured that Lick had the right staff available at the right times, effectively navigating seasonal peaks and troughs in demand.

Visualising workforce management metrics

In addition to streamlining scheduling and prioritising tickets, Surfboard’s dashboard offered Lick more granular visibility into service performance metrics. This included retro information and individual metrics on a per-agent level.

Lick could now assess its performance against target response times, analyse metrics such as tickets per hour and average handle time per agent, and tailor coaching efforts accordingly. Surfboard empowered Lick with the insights needed to continually enhance its customer experience strategies.

“Surfboard has saved me an enormous amount of time in scheduling. Knowing that our channels will be covered appropriately with the right surfers at the right time is invaluable to us.

We’ll always have to react to unexpected situations that crop up throughout the day but with Surfboard’s scheduling capabilities, I can make the right decisions for my team and my customers.”
— Rose Goodbody, Decorator Success Manager, Lick Home