Cuckoo is the fastest, fairest, feel-good broadband out there. They get you set up efficiently in just 24 hours and their incredible customer service is reflected in their stellar customer service reviews. They have an ever-growing customer support team of ‘Eggsperts’ making sure all their customers’ needs are met.

Cuckoo’s challenges

Competing within the regulated broadband industry, customer service is a critical differentiator, meaning that getting it right is a top priority for Cuckoo. Added to that, it’s an uphill battle– only 7% of consumers believe utility suppliers are customer centric.

Before joining Surfboard, Cuckoo were using a system of four different spreadsheets that were sent out week by week. This was very manual, effort-intensive, and took up a lot of their managers time.

How Surfboard helped Cuckoo

Since using Surfboard, they’ve grown to over 50 ‘Eggsperts’ to meet the demand of their customers and provide industry leading customer service, knowing that Surfboard helps them handle their shifts and daily activities with minimal involvement from their team leads. 

Simplifying staff scheduling

Surfboard is integrated with Cuckoo’s Intercom, so the number of staff they need adapts to the level of inbound demand they see on any particular channel.

Setting up connections is easy in Surfboard. All they had to do was authenticate the Intercom API within Surfboard and set up their ticket groups to match how their team splits inbound contacts.

Once they were connected, they scheduled intraday activities based on the number of inbounds they had coming in whilst also having the freedom to adjust the length and priority of the activity based on their ways of working. They also added time for their team to work on admin and projects so that Surfboard could be a single source of truth surrounding time management, enabling their managers and team members to be as productive as possible.

Helping agent training

Cuckoo have grown rapidly from a customer support team of 9 to over 50 eggsperts across multiple smaller teams. They onboard their team members in cohorts, having two weeks of structured training before moving on to shadow other eggsperts. This is easily accounted for simply in Surfboard, by assigning activities to groups as well as individuals.

They also ask that all of their new team leads are initially trained as eggsperts before moving onto the management role. Surfboard has made this easier by creating an adaptable schedule which allows managers to freely move their eggsperts across the different teams and allocate time for training and onboarding. When onboarding new teams, they’ve seen a significant improvement in how this has improved their daily coverage and the level of support their team has on different channels.

Improving visibility

The majority of the Cuckoo team works remotely but they also have offices in London and Leeds. Using tools like Intercom and Surfboard has helped increase visibility across their team. Increased visibility within remote teams leads to better rapport, stronger support, and happier surfers.

Cuckoo have seen these benefits, particularly in the camaraderie of the team and the level of inbound demand they meet. Another benefit is transparency. The team knows what one another is working on, which is also reflected in their Slack status.

Cuckoo have found that the Surfboard slack integration has helped their team in a variety of ways. Managers love that they can quickly see what their teams are working on, and Surfers find it useful to know who they can ask for help if they are feeling overwhelmed on any channel.

Improving workforce scheduling efficiency

The team at Cuckoo offers support through multiple channels – including live chat, email, phone, and social media – and needs to be able to efficiently manage inbound conversation volume and staff resourcing in order to provide the best possible experiences for their customers.

The team strives to make getting support as easy as possible, which is why they implemented the Intercom Messenger on their website to offer a fast and seamless way for customers to get help when it’s needed.

With Intercom’s bots and automation capabilities, Cuckoo empowers customers to self-serve by automatically suggesting helpful articles and resources directly in the Messenger that they can use to resolve their own issues. If they need further help, the bots can collect important context related to their query and route them to the right person to help them. This not only saves the support team valuable time, it enables them to provide fast, efficient support to customers – and create great experiences along the way.

Using Surfboard integrated with Intercom, Cuckoo is able to monitor volume trends in inbound customer queries and dynamically adapt the number of staff needed to help their customers at any given time.

Cuckoo, Surfboard, and Intercom have enjoyed a productive and successful relationship together. Cuckoo has used Surfboard to scale their customer support team, while Surfboard has learned how to best serve growing support teams, empowering them to scale in the process. The powerful toolset of Surfboard and Intercom have empowered Cuckoo eggsperts to provide best-in-class support for their customers.

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If you’re an organisation like Cuckoo and you’re looking to improve customer service at scale, feel free to explore Surfboard’s capabilities. 

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