Impementation Story: Usedesk and "First CUPIS"

From e-mails and tables to automation: how an online bet service reduced the response time by 5 times and reduced the cost of request processing by 3 times thanks to Usedesk.

1cupis.ru

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Usedesk Implementation Results

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7 months later

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2 Times More

requests/month are processed without hiring more people

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5 Times Faster

employees respond

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3 Times Cheaper

is the cost of one request

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The "First CUPIS" isn't just a service. It's a state-of-the-art. Online bets are very hot potato and not so many people are good at it. But if you want to find someone who do it professionally and legally, you'll risk to stay with nothing.

These guys not only managed to organize debugged service to take interactive bets. They managed to provide their customers with high-quality customer service regarding any questions and difficulties. How did they manage to do it despite a huge request flow? With the help of Usedesk and an awesome team led by Olga Mglintseva, Head of User Support Management, who we talked to and found out a lot of details.

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- Hi, Olga! First of all, tell us please about the way you work. How many requests does your support department process and what channels do you use?

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Now our support department employees only 8 people excluding their manager. In awarege we process about 6 thousand requests a month through channels like e-mail, feedback form on our website, social media, chat in Telegram. Our guys also have a whole bunch of calls from four different channels. Now we have about 7-9 thousand of them in total.

Our product – "First CUPIS" – is new in the market. Its appearance is caused by the changes in legislations that control gambling activity in Russia. That's why for gamblers that were used to gambling illegally our procedures are absolutely unclear. We face a lot of questions from customers: about registration and identification, about our interaction with gamblers. We also face with payment problems, personal account accesses. Just like any other payment system.

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- That's impressive! How did you use to do it before the Usedesk implementation?

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Before Usedesk we used to use another service for a year. The name of it I'll keep in secret since I don't want to recommend it to anyone. It didn't have any advantages except for automated responses and it was free. We could have just used our e-mail, but we didn't since we had 5 of them.

We had answer templates which we loaded in our Knowledge base. To use them we firstly needed to find them, then copy, then paste in a tracker, then edit, and only after that – send.

We used to collect our statystics in Google-tables, which was very time-consuming, and the employees would always forget about it.

The number of written requests increased by almost 2 times withing the 7 months we have been using Usedesk. I can't even imagine how we could suffer and how big our personnal would be now if we had worked on our old scheme.

Having implemented Usedesk, we haven't hired any new employee. We even added some more tasks to our current staff (here a devil emoji should be).

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Having implemented Usedesk, we haven't hired any new employee. We even added some more tasks to our current staff.

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- Tell us what made you transform your customer service to Usedesk?

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We have been considering changing our helpdesk from time to time since the beginning of 2016. We have checked about 30 different helpdesks within 1.5 year of searching – Russian ones and foreign, but no helpdesk could satisfy us. We are a payment system, we have customers' personal information, that's why it was essential for us to have a helpdesk on our servers.

In addition, our requirements for helpdesk more than doubled, so it seemed as there could be no decision. We needed automated responses, various statystics, highlighters for missed requests, and, of course, we wanted it cheaper.

At the beginning of 2017 we decided to make a Telegram-bot and that's why we split. I was looking for people who could make a bot for us, and Anna – Head of Customer Support – continued looking for a helpdesk. And at some point it happened (or maybe Usedesk set up Yandex.Direct? :) Me and Anna texted them at the same time, each of us regarding our questions. We collected all our requirement, sent it to you... and few hours later we understood that us and Usedesk were made for each other.

We only had to prove it to our management, but it's all a different story, which as you know was a happy-end.

And we couldn't ignore the fact that the guys said "yes" to every "want". And up to now we haven't hear a "no" from them. No matter what we asked (and we still do).

If we summarize it:

1. We can place Usedesk on our servers – this is a 100% advantage for us. To be more exact, this is something that we couldn't avoid.

2. The standard set has an opportunity to create answer templates that work by the rules – transfer statuses of requests.

3. We are trying to reduce the number of incoming requests. That's why we develop our payment system interface, change business processes inside the company based on the request analysis. Tags that are added to requests automatically help us with it a lot.

4. There are also rules of automation that help us avoid some manual actions and reduce the load on customer service.

5. And the main advantage is the Usedesk flexibility which I praised earlier.

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And the main advantage is the Usedesk flexibility — they haven't said "no" to any of our requirements.

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- Very often the reason to keep an old helpdesk is a fear that the transformation would be too difficult and painful. How did you manage it?

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I must say the deadlines were a little moved forward. We kept postponing because of the agreement confirmation, Usedesk couldn't get to our servers right away. After that we had to transfer all our channels, move the archive from our tracker, create thousands of various answer templates, create automation. We didn't have a task to set it all up right away. Within 3 month we, step by step, implemented some new changes. And we keep doing it now, but mostly some minor changes. In general everything went fine, there is nothing to be scared of, because the changes worth it.

By the way, some basic setting were made by Usedesk. Katerina Vinokhodova looked through our processes and created the essential setting, added templates. She stayed in touch all the time when we didn't understand something.

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- Were your team resistant against the new helpdesk?

Before launching I made a presentation for the employees, and Usedesk seemed to them as a gift from heavens. They had a lot of difficulties with our old tracker, that's why they loved Usedesk. Of course, we had some minor difficulties. Everyone couldn't orientate within the template names, they would always forget to add a tag, they didn't pay attention to the requests that the automation hadn't processed correctly. But it's all about their experience.

In general, they were amazed. They only need 1.5 minute maximum for the requests which they used to spend 5-7 minutes on.

By the way, here they are – don't they look happy? You can see how bright their eyes are. You can even see their halos:

- Do you have any results you are proud of?

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It's difficult to say which results have changed since the statistics from our previous tracker wasn't very satisfying. I know for sure that the response time has shortened, the cost of request processing has shortened approximately by 3 times. It's not only because of Usedesk. It's also because of reorganisation of the Support department. But Usedesk gave us a lot more chances for this transformation.

Thanks to the automation rules 14% of our requests close automatically, but we're still working on it. For instance, we decided that we could show short inctructions for our employees in comments when they add some tags so they don't need to open the Knowledge base.

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We only need 1.5 minute maximum for the requests which we used to spend 5-7 minutes on. The cost of request processing has shortened approximately by 3 times.

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- Thank you for sharing. Finally, I want to ask what a lof of people doubt about. Does the investment in customer service pay off? Is it very important, or can you just let it be the way it is?

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Well, our customers is our money. Any problem with payments is a huge stress for a customer who can get one problem and won't use our service ever again. These problems require to be solved immediately. If you can't solve the problem right away, you have to explain it precisely why you can't do it now and give an accurate deadline. We give rapid responses and try to make them simple and easy to understand. We don't quote the agreement.

If we don't solve our customer's problem the way he wants it, he will leave. That's why we keep going forward.

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USED TO BE — NOW

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Mostly manual work, low reponding speed and high cost of request processing as a result.

Department analytics is in tables and, again, manually.

Answer templates were used, but the employees had to copy them every time from their Knowledge base.

There was no tag system for optimization and request statistics.

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Thanks to automation 14% of requests resolve automatically.

It takes only a couple of clicks to work with templated responses. The Knowledge base can be easily updated.

The response time reduced from 7 to 1.5 minutes.

The cost of request processing reduced by 3 times.

The number of requests has doubled, the staff stayed the same.

Usedesk is placed on company's servers. There are no problems with customers' personal information.

The employees use the same interface no matter what channel customers chose to contact from.