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Ostrom hits a 4.8 star Trustpilot score with Surfboard
Natasha Ratanshi-Stein , Founder & CEO
“We’re still a small team but love that we already have Surfboard in place so that as we grow we can plan headcount based on actual data and make sure that we’re always working on the right things for the business”
— Rahel Kunkel, Operations Lead, Ostrom
Ostrom provides renewable energy at fair prices across all of Germany. Offering in-app live support in both English and German, quick response customer service is an essential part of their growth strategy.
Ostrom’s challenges
Operating in the regulated and competitive utility industry, and a big part of Ostrom’s value proposition is around exceptional customer service. Compared to legacy incumbents with wait times that can reach an hour, Ostrom set out to disrupt the industry with better service, fairer prices and a smarter energy experience.
This means that they pride themselves on responding to all live chats from Intercom within minutes.
In order to do this, Rahel, who manages the Operations team at Ostrom, needs to make sure she has the right coverage across the day so that live chats get responded to in a timely manner.
As an early-stage company, Ostrom hadn’t previously used other forecasting tools – moving from a shift plan in a Notion Sheet to Surfboard. For them, usability and ability to scale their team with an easy-to-implement solution was critical in selecting Surfboard.
How Surfboard helped Ostrom
Ostrom started using Surfboard in May 2023.
Following this partnership, Ostrom sits at an industry-leading score of 4.8 stars on Trustpilot. This score speaks for itself, as Ostrom’s customer service leads the pack among other renewable energy and utility companies.
Integrated forecasting features
Connecting their Intercom setup to Surfboard, they have been able to see their ticket volume in order to schedule according to forecasts, with varying service levels based on the type of work the team works on.
As a scaling company, Ostrom relies on other members of the company to pitch in to support in order to maintain quick response times. Ostrom schedules other team members directly into Surfboard, so the wider company has visibility on when they need to be working on chat and tickets,
Time off integrations
Using Personio as their HR system means that Surfboard automatically fetches time off and absences to reflect this in the team schedule. This allows Rahel’s team to look in one place to see who can be scheduled and who is off, so they can pull other people onto service tasks accordingly.
Intraday scheduling
In addition to inbound responses that sit within Intercom, Ostrom also uses intraday scheduling for non-inbound tasks on Surfboard. These include when their team works operational topics within their software, as well as admin tasks such as updating dashboards and reporting.
Make-it-better days e.g. off duty days are also scheduled and make time for internal topics such as automations, or process optimisations. With Surfboard, they’re sure they always have these tasks covered by the right people.
“As a growing utility company, we know our inflow is going to scale proportionally to our growth and our team will expand quickly.
— Rahel Kunkel, Operations Lead, Ostrom
We needed a solution in place that wasn’t overkill for a company of our size, but where we knew it would help us scale with the right levels of organisation to manage demands on our customer service operations”.
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If you’re looking to expand your business while maintaining stellar service levels, find out how Surfboard can help your customer service reach new heights.
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