Date Published:: June 19, 2023
Categories:: Success Stories

Ostrom hits a 4.8 ⭐ Trustpilot score with Surfboard

Written by:

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein , Founder & CEO

With Surfboard super powering their scheduling, Ostrom is able to maintain a 4.8* Trustpilot score.

Company: 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.

Industry: Utilities

Headquarters: Berlin, Germany

The challenge

Operating in the regulated and competitive utility industry, 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 had not used other forecasting tools previously – 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.

“As a growing utility company, we know our inflow is going to scale proportionally to our growth and our team will expand quickly.

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”. – Rahel Kunkel, Operations Lead

Surfboard’s solution

Ostrom started using Surfboard in May 2023.

Connecting their Intercom setup to Surfboard, they have been able to see their ticket volume in order to schedule according to forecast, 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. So that the wider company has visibility on when they need to be working on chat and tickets, Ostrom schedules other team members directly into Surfboard.

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.

In addition to inbound responses that sit within Intercom, Ostrom also schedules time 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 can make sure they always have these tasks covered by the right people.

“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