Hometree’s 24/7 support team has automated scheduling using Surfboard, consolidating four different systems into one and replacing the need for spreadsheets.

Company: Hometree provides boiler protection to UK households with transparent pricing, an easy claim process and speedy fixes.

Industry: Insurance

Headquarters: London, UK

The challenge

Hometree operates in the boiler insurance space, meaning that when a customer calls to make a claim, it’s urgent.

High service levels attainment is critical as a customer service metric and their team works across four channels: phone, live chat, email and social media.

Prior to Surfboard, Hometree was scheduling on a number of spreadsheets. With three different managers organising team rotas, their spreadsheets became increasingly difficult to manage with a plethora of comments and version control issues.

Fairness is something extremely important to managers at Hometree. When deciding to work with Surfboard, the mission of making work more human resonated with Hometree’s Chief Commercial Officer Pranjal Arya.

They had looked at other scheduling software but didn’t want something that just optimises for resource allocation. With spreadsheets, they were manually having to eyeball whether shifts and tasks to ensure a fair allocation across the team beyond just coverage against channel requirements.

“The return on investment of Surfboard was already obvious by saving team leads within the organisation over 30 hours per month plus our saving team members time from moving between different spreadsheets.

The additional benefit of being the only software provider that puts fairness at the forefront of how their workforce management system works was a key differentiator for us.” – Pranjal Arya

Surfboard’s solution

Hometree moved their scheduling from spreadsheets to Surfboard in 2022.

With the ability to manage different shift rotations so that Hometree could respond to any customer emergency with 24/7 coverage, Hometree was immediately able to streamline their support operations and scheduling through connecting Surfboard’s forecasting to schedules.

Beyond inbound customer support, Hometree’s team also has scheduled team meetings through Google Calendar which are automatically synced into Surfboard schedules.

They use Bamboo HR for booking time off (holidays, sickness, parental leave) and link their Surfboard account directly to Bamboo so that schedules can automatically account for who is off and can’t be scheduled.

“Being able to connect multiple systems in one place is extremely important for us and we couldn’t facilitate this on spreadsheets”.

With Surfboard shift patterns, Hometree is also able to automate timezone management.

In order to cover their 24/7 customer demands, they use a follow the sun model – working with teams in across multiple timezones.

The team customises their break windows to optimise lunches at the right time – so the team can get a well-deserved break without leaving support channels inadequately covered as a result.

Having been impressed with the results and automations around Surfboard scheduling Hometree began using other features.

These included forecast adjustments to accommodate unforeseen peaks in ticket volumes as well as time and attendance reporting.

The simplicity and cleanliness of the user interface was an important differentiator for Pranjal when choosing software, “The look and feel of the Surfboard app is extremely welcoming for both leads and our team members. We didn’t want to adopt something that felt legacy or made people dread interacting with their schedules.

Surfboard offers a refreshing experience compared to other workforce management software and it’s important that for a growing company like ours, we work with a modern tech stack”

With Surfboard powering Hometree’s team orchestration, they have become the highest-rated boiler insurance provider on Trustpilot.

Key features used by Hometree:

• Intraday scheduling
• Forecasting (Zendesk and Zendesk talk) across phone, live chat and email
• Channel based staffing calculations
• Shift planning
• Time and attendance reporting
• Time off integrations

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