Drift improves the scheduling experience for their support team after transitioning from another WFM provider in just one week

Company: Drift is a rapidly growing company that provides innovative conversational marketing and sales solutions

Industry: SaaS

Headquarters: Boston, USA

Integrations: Salesforce, Slack, Google Calendar

The challenge

As the company expanded their customer support function, they recognised the need for an effective workforce management software to streamline their operations and enhance employee productivity, as well as support their omni-channel support and ethos of being customer first.

They had worked with another WFM provider for the last two years but weren’t able to get their full team using it due to lack of product simplicity and support from the provider.

The team made the decision to switch to Surfboard because of three main reasons:

1. A fully integrated system – with Drift’s previous WFM provider, Drift was unable to integrate Slack, their time-off (HRIS) system, and ticketing platform (Salesforce).

The integration with Salesforce specifically, a critical component of Drift’s ticketing stack, wasn’t working as expected. This resulted in inaccurate data, leading to discrepancies in reporting and decision-making processes. This meant forecasts were wrong and couldn’t be used to power scheduling. Surfboard built a custom Salesforce integration to match how Drift had set up their ticketing.

With their previous WFM offering no connection with Drift’s HRIS system, multiple systems of record were created, complicating workflows and increasing the risk of manual error.

2. A cleaner UX/UI making it easy for the entire team to adopt – the UX/UI of Drift’s previous WFM provider was complex and difficult to digest. Team leads struggled to find a clear scheduling view and had difficulty understanding the many reporting modules. With Surfboard, everything from the terminology to the visuals make it easy for anyone to grasp.
3. Dedicated support – their onboarding experience and ongoing support with their previous WFM was non-existent. The team felt neglected and unable to maximise their use of the tool. Employees struggled to leverage the platform effectively, leading to suboptimal resource allocation and inefficient scheduling. The Drift team understandably wanted to move to a solution with a more involved onboarding and a dedicated CSM for their account. With Surfboard, Drift gets a custom slack channel to speak to the Surfboard team about anything and everything.

Surfboard’s solution

Drift’s customer support team began using Surfboard in June 2023. Their experience immediately improved across a number of parameters:

1. Quality of support and onboarding training 🏄: Drift benefited from Surfboard’s tailored onboarding and training sessions as well as our ongoing support. This ensured that team leads and agents were well-equipped to utilise the full range of Surfboard’s capabilities effectively, most notably forecasting, scheduling and shift planning.
2. A product that their team could understand and love immediately 💖: The clean and simple interface and integrated features allowed Drift’s CX team members to quickly grasp Surfboard’s functionalities, reducing the learning curve and accelerating their productivity. The dedicated support Surfboard provided reaffirmed to them that “Surfboard is just as invested in the success of this as we are” – Ben Gardner, VP Customer Support
3. Integrations into the rest of Drift’s tech stack 🔗: Surfboard’s connection into Salesforce, Ultipro and Slack means that Drift is able to experience the benefits associated with streamlined workforce planning; ensuring accurate shift assignments, capacity planning per channel and facilitating efficient time-off management.

With a clear view of their team’s schedule and availability, team leads can make informed decisions on resource allocation, avoiding understaffing or overstaffing scenarios.

The integration between Surfboard and Slack enhances communication and collaboration among team members. Real-time notifications within the Surfboard system are seamlessly shared in designated Slack channels, promoting transparency and reducing response time.

Drift’s most loved features in Surfboard

Time zone picker
The Drift customer support team is spread across 6 different timezones. Our timezone picker gives team leads the ability to quickly view the schedule in surfers native time zones, as well as the ability to quickly view the schedule at large in multiple time zones.

Shift plans
With two teams and different shift plans for each, Drift’s scheduling leads can schedule depending on the working patterns skills and labour laws of each team. Our shift plan capability allows the team to quickly build “set it and forget it” shift patterns for the respective teams with a few clicks. This feature is a favourite with the team leads at Drift, with one commenting:

“I’m absolutely loving shift plans. With our old tool, I couldn’t designate shifts and had to remember when everyone’s shifts took place. This dynamic approach to scheduling really compliments the workflows of my team”

Intraday scheduling
With more than twelve activities rotating on surfer daily schedules, it’s crucial for team leads at Drift to be able to capacity plan by channel, to figure out which activities to staff their team on and when. Surfboard offers a coverage bar so that team leads can have a clear view on where there are risks for coverage gaps throughout the day. Surfboard also automates the activity allocation based on who is available, who is skilled to work on each task, and what the required coverage is.

“During the renewal process with our previous tool I was contacted by the team at Surfboard. I could tell right away this was a company that was all in to support their end users because I had the CEO join the call from the get go.

That was the most important part of the selection process to me: what kind of support would we expect to onboard and would we hear from you after we launched? Early indicators showed it was going to be a close partnership and they haven’t disappointed yet.

We are able to get things done the right way with the right help from the right people. I know we’re in good hands and we’ve already saved a lot of time in getting up and running and being efficient that we didn’t have with our previous solution.” – Ben Gardner, VP Customer Support

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