Frosch boosted customer care with efficient software

The Challenge

Frosch Travel is one of the world’s leading corporate and luxury travel management companies. Co-headquartered in New York and Houston, it has offices in more than 40 locations worldwide.

FROSCH's global remote customer care team consists of almost 200 agents, who provide 24/7 support for its corporate travel clients. However, keeping customers happy and maintaining a high retention rate was becoming more and more difficult.

Chris Evans, VP of IT Operations, knew that FROSCH had to change its customer support software. Frosch's current solution using Outlook shared inboxes was clumsy and prevented the team from improving its customer satisfaction rating.

"Things got to a stage where we knew we had to change. Management didn't have reasons why things were happening because we didn't have the reporting capability."

A lack of visibility and reporting on the agents' activities, including whether 10-minute SLAs were being hit or not, was making management of the remote teams even more tricky. Having global support brings global problems. Auto-assignments to out-of-hours agents, round robins, and custom working hours were something Outlook's shared inboxes couldn't provide.

"Using Outlook, we didn't have visibility on how agents were responding and what they were responding with until there was a complaint."

Every organization that works with FROSCH has its email address which employees can email for support and travel solutions. With over 600 organizations, things can get out of hand if not managed properly. So Chris began the search for a helpdesk software platform to skyrocket FROSCH’s customer service output.

The Solution

As Frosch had previously only had Outlook as a customer support tool, Chris was anxious that there wouldn't be a tool on the market that could work with its number of teams and business rules. With 75% of communication via email, he was also keen to ensure that the visibility of its customer support teams was transparent.

Michael Kennedy, IT Infrastructure Engineer, previously worked with and implemented Deskpro at another travel management company. During the ultimate evaluation of its helpdesk shortlist, Chris asked for Michael's expertise on how Deskpro would integrate into Frosch's support workflows.

"This is the second company that I've implemented Deskpro at, and I knew that it could do what we needed it to do. Having both Cloud and On-Premise deployment options meant we could make that decision later down the line."

Initially, Frosch was looking at Deskpro Cloud but realized On-Premise would be more malleable to its needs with Michael and an IT experienced team. Frosch decided to proceed with Deskpro starting with a proof-of-concept trial. Michael set up Deskpro with just one client that had access to both day-time and after-hours support as a test. After the initial testing phase, the team at Frosch was able to scale up very quickly.

“Deskpro’s Admin interface is so powerful, especially with the different options (new, update, reply) for ticket triggers, it's a huge advantage for us. We have UK, EMEA, and US routing and using triggers to create custom filters for email addresses to distribute tickets across four support teams depending on the time of day, day of the week, and type of inquiry.”

The Benefits

Since FROSCH implemented Deskpro, it has streamlined customer support and increased productivity hours.

“We have 734 new ticket triggers, 850 departments, and over 650 unique outgoing email addresses. Once we had set them up, it has saved us countless hours by automating so many of the complexities of routing, mapping, and responding.”

Deskpro has automated manual tasks such as evaluating its agents' and teams' competence, consistency, and resilience. The built-in reporting and dashboards have enabled Chris and the management team to see who the high performers are. It also opened their eyes to team members who had been considered high performers but were minimally engaged. So has allowed FROSCH to ensure its team only contains efficient and effective agents.

“The agents working in the support team are now accountable for doing their jobs well, which has been a key business model change. We now have instant visibility, plus how, when, and the frequency of their responses.”

Implementing SLAs has increased accountability, improved customer experience, and enabled the support team to take more pride in fast and effective responses.

“Notifications in Deskpro have been huge. We integrated Clickatell with SLAs so that if a certain threshold is reached, such as X tickets in X time, it sends a text message to alert the appropriate team members. It has been wickedly successful and very well received in our after-hours and operations groups.”.

The Future

After Michael led the architecture and setup of FROSCH’s new helpdesk, he handed over the reins to Chris and his team. With so much customization of triggers and escalations, Michael leveraged the API to allow rule creation by other departments.

“Michael has done some serious surgery on the platform to customize it completely to our workflows. That is one of the best things about Deskpro, it works as an out-of-the-box solution, but you can also make it completely your own. That’s where the power is.”

Traditionally, corporate travel support has always been via email or phone. Chris and his team understand that communication is changing, especially between different generations.

“Before we even started looking for a helpdesk solution, we knew the future for Frosch needs to include different channels of communication, such as live chat, to allow us to keep up with millennials.”

Because the Live Chat channel is included in their Deskpro license, Chris knew that they were future-proofing the helpdesk. Rolling-out live chat at FROSCH won't incur any upgrade costs or any third-party tools.

Frosch plans to test out Live Chat with a select group (using chat permission groups) before making it available to all of its customers.