Going

The Challenge

Going is a travel membership service that notifies subscribers of great airfare deals. The company has an entirely remote team whose CRM wasn’t used to its potential. There was room to enhance workflows to improve agent happiness and respond to customers faster.

The Results

• Improved CSAT scores
• Evenly distributed workload
• Agents access information in less time

“Kustomer helps me simplify our member success team’s workflow, add useful features, and streamline the user experience. Giving our people a voice in designing their tools makes them more productive and improves their quality of life.”

Robert Raimondi, Senior Systems Operations Specialist, Going

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The Story

Going is an email subscription service that links two million budget-conscious travelers to airlines offering the best flight deals. It’s hard to find travel deals anymore, but Going helps subscribers stay connected and on top of the best discounts at their preferred airports.

Going previously used Front for a customer communication platform before migrating to Kustomer. Initially after the migration, Going’s support team wasn’t taking full advantage of Kustomer. For example, the support team didn’t rely on the platform to resolve issues related to limited-time promotions, and Going’s marketing and product teams weren’t using Kustomer to track promotion activity.

When Robert Raimondi joined Going as Senior Systems Operations Specialist, he saw that Kustomer already had all the tools to resolve these pain points. He took the opportunity to optimize the platform even more and improve the Going experience for their customers. “We wanted to be able to subdivide the teams into different roles, like an email team and chat team, and then have automatic assignments instead of routing depending on certain criteria,” Raimondi said. “I wanted to see how far I could push the platform, so I spent the next twelve months playing around with the system. It was very hands-on, and I was learning as I went along.”

Being small, Going wanted to improve their automation by creating workflows that would automate some of the more tedious processes. Raimondi discovered how to establish conditional rules that would smartly route emails and chats into certain channels to be delivered to associates.

Then they started sending member support assignments to specific teams instead of routing them based on content. Doing this ensured that all agents got easy and difficult calls in equal measure. “Not only did it speed up the associates’ ability to address emails and get them done more efficiently, but they didn’t have to worry about the potential for cherry picking and difficult conversations never being answered,” Raimondi said.

Automating tasks also helped resolve issues and track responses on promotional campaigns, which often have tight deadlines.

Another improvement addressed their testimonial emails, which took up a sizable portion of their inbox. They used an auto-responder to send participants an email thanking them for the testimonial. That alone eliminated 20% of the volume in their inbox. These and other customer emails remain visible in Slack for teams to browse and share as they’d like.

Now, Going can route a chat request to their support team in 30 seconds, and they use custom queues to ensure they address time-sensitive content more quickly. These changes have increased Going’s CSAT scores.

Raimondi also learned how to modify Kustomer’s Insight Panel interface. He embedded the tools Going’s agents need to do their work so they don’t have to open 15 different tabs or bookmark 10 different tools. Rather than engaging in repetitive copy-and-paste efforts for each customer, agents now access what they need with a single click, becoming more time efficient and reducing frustration.

Throughout the process, Kustomer offered great support that was quick and personable. “They have really great support. They’re right there with us,” Raimondi said. “I’ve worked at much bigger companies that had really huge corporate enterprise-level CRMs in the past, like Zendesk. I don’t have anything against those products, but because they’re so large there isn’t quite that same feeling. It’s a little bit more sterile, a little bit more cookie cutter.”

What’s Next

Going is small and mighty, with 60 employees throughout the United States. Kustomer treats them just as well as any larger customer, always responding quickly so Going can keep moving forward.

“Kustomer understands how we operate. They provide top-notch support and never take more than a day to answer a question,” Raimondi said. “Sometimes, I’ll hop on a 40-minute Zoom call with their engineers and try different things to resolve the issue. We’ll fiddle and faddle until we fix it, which is much faster than spending days on Google trying to figure it out myself.”

Support agents are often the bottom rung of the ladder and don’t have the opportunity to have any sort of influence on the tools they use. Kustomer changes that dynamic. It’s flexible enough to make drastic changes within minutes, giving agents the opportunity to provide feedback as to what is helpful, useful, and most visually appealing to make their workflow easier. For Robert, it’s all about removing roadblocks to helping address customers’ needs faster.

“No matter how much you love your job, there’s always something that you’d be loving to do more,” Raimondi said. “So anything we can do to make their job less stressful, less annoying, definitely something we should take the opportunity to jump on.”