How Going Improved CSAT Scores by 20% in Less Than One Year

Challenge

Going has seen steady growth since it landed on the scene in 2015. The concept is simple and one that continues to gain in popularity: Members get amazing foreign travel opportunities at incredible prices. They pick a departure airport, and Going locates tremendous deals around the world by using a combination of software and human flight experts.

But Going is also in the business of creating seamless, end-to-end customer experiences that include everything from expert assistance and ready answers to an easy scheduling process. The company’s communications channels include email and social media, and seven of its 38 employees make up a Member Success team, who manage the QA program.

Going obviously knew that reliable, responsive customer service depends on ongoing quality assurance (QA) in the way of regular evaluation and feedback. The issue was the QA process itself: it was so bulky and time-consuming that it was eventually abandoned altogether by analysts. Virtually no one on the customer service team was being evaluated!

In fact, the everyday tedium of QA spreadsheets had finally pushed Member Success Team Lead Nicole Rinker and others to the edge. “It was getting to the point where all of the analysts, including me, were dreading doing it,” she says. “We actually abandoned our first QA program sometime in September 2019.”

Using Google Sheets didn’t allow looking at historical data or creating reports. Analysts were pulling conversations by hand from the Kustomer CRM system and manually putting them onto a spreadsheet. And because scoring for agents was inconsistent, managers would vary on scores for the same agent.

“We have multiple analysts and we were completely uncalibrated,” Rinker says. “One person would give the conversation a 70; another would give it a 100. It was a mess.”

In view of a challenging travel landscape and with plans to expand into domestic markets, Going needed to double down on its commitment to customer service—and especially, to reboot its QA program.

Solution

Once Going launched a search of several QA companies, Playvox quickly became the standout because of its robust functionality. In fact, Playvox Quality, Coaching and Motivation software offered exactly what Going needed:

• Standardized processes
• Improved coaching
• Agent engagement

The company chose Playvox Quality for the scorecards’ ease of use in conducting QA and calibrating QA analysts. Rinker says her team picked up on using Playvox tools in as little as 20 minutes, and the look and organization of the scorecards were big factors.

“The biggest surprise is when I saw all that information displayed and in so many different ways,” she says. “Even my manager was like, ‘Wow, it’s beautiful.’

“We never had that before, the pie charts and the bar graphs–it really makes sense,” she continues. “It’s so easy to read. That’s what I share at our weekly team meetings, along with a little screenshot of one of the graphs.”

Although not included in the company’s initial requirements, it didn’t take long for Playvox Motivation to win over the Going team with its exclusive features for boosting agent morale. Rinker was so excited about Playvox Motivation that she created a customized badge system to recognize the best-performing agents every month.

The company’s agent engagement activities are snowballing. Going’s plans to expand using Playvox Karma Points and the Karma Store to further reward great performances and badge earners. Agents will earn Karma Points to purchase items in the online Karma Store—tickets for events, time off and a host of other offerings of Going’s choosing.

Results

After going live with Playvox in Q2 2020, Going began to see results almost immediately. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) increased in the first month from 77% to 83%. And the trend continued throughout the first three months, with CSAT reaching 88%– and then 93% after just seven months.

“We’re really satisfied with the jump we’ve seen in CSAT,” Rinker says. “Playvox has helped us better understand where our Member Success team is successful and where we could use a little more ‘love,’ or training.

“Being able to see correlations between CSAT and service quality has been an added benefit,” she continues. “With data from Playvox, we’ve been able to prove that low CSAT isn’t always the result of bad support, but instead, of something going wrong in another area of the business.”

Rinker continues to share pie charts and bar graphs in weekly team meetings, which she says the team loves because they can see where they have to realign or where something needs to be changed.

“I’m actually able to pinpoint areas where we need to improve,” Rinker says. “This is something we couldn’t do with the spreadsheets we had before.”

Since implementing Playvox software, Going’s internal “health check” score is consistently in the 9s out of a possible 10 every month. In every report, Rinker says, agents now consistently report that they feel appreciated for the hard work they do.

With Playvox Quality, Going’s analysts initially performed 113 evaluations over a four-month period. The Member Success team now averages more than 140 evaluations per month.

Sometimes the best results aren’t measured by the numbers but in changes in company culture. Rinker says that the overall attitude is more positive, with analysts actually looking forward to doing evaluations.

“One of our senior specialists who used to use the spreadsheets actually told me ‘It’s fun now—I like doing it,’ and she wants to do more evaluations,” Rinker says. “She was among those who disliked it the most. Something is definitely going right now!”

Rinker says agents are enjoying it as well, particularly the evaluation feedback. When an agent gets feedback, he or she gets an alert immediately, which means the feedback is timely and meaningful and actionable. In the past, Rinker said, feedback on a spreadsheet tended to get lost in the shuffle and lose its value.

The company sees blue skies ahead, too. Going plans to expand domestically and in July 2020, began beta-testing in 10 U.S. cities. The company also plans to personalize the customer experience by introducing travel profiles based on member bucket lists for where, when and with whom they like to travel.