Article • 5 min read
Fullscript’s prescription for omnichannel customer success
By Kelly Tan
Last updated April 25, 2018
Fullscript provides a single, easy route to better health. The startup, founded in 2012, makes a wide array of professional-grade supplements available to medical practitioners so that they don’t have to maintain an inventory. By shipping directly to consumers, Fullscript ensures that patients always get exactly what they need.
This low-effort approach extends to Fullscript’s customer support, too. With GAAP revenue growth of a staggering 2,000+ percent over the last three years, in 2017 Fullscript made the decision to move off a combination of siloed support tools and adopt an all-in-one solution. We talked to Marcus Sinclair, Fullscript’s head of customer success, to learn more about his team’s omnichannel strategy and rollout.
Fullscript chose to adopt Zendesk Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk all at once—what was the strategy behind this decision?
I’ll give you a little backstory. I came from another business that used Zendesk and integrated it with third-party tools. But the great thing is that Zendesk offers everything in one place and each product works well together. From my view, adopting the whole solution means that we don’t have to coordinate with multiple vendors or get developers to integrate disparate products.
It’s simpler for us, but also—we care more about our customer experience than anything else. If a customer has a question, we want to ensure that they aren’t stuck listening to hold music or passed from one department to another. We want everyone to come in and get their answers solved on a personal level—with one person. If that person doesn’t know the answer, they’re going to find it and get back to the customer. The customer should never have to try again, using another channel. We want to relieve as much pressure and strain as possible.
Can you give us a snapshot of your customer success org?
We have about 20 agents, and that number might grow to around 100 by the end of the year. We’re primarily based in Ottawa, Canada and offer support in English and French. We try to meet the hours of our customer base, so we offer extended support 9 a.m. – 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and then 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. I’ve got three teams—soon to be four—and they work in shifts to cover time zone differences.
Fullscript offers support through email, live chat, phone, social media, and self-service. How do you think about staffing your channels?
Any agent can answer a question in any channel—it goes back to that idea of each customer only having to talk to one agent. We believe in a generalist model, so we train everyone on everything. Let’s say we get an influx of email one day and have a slow day on other channels… with this model, we’re able to focus our attention on the channel with the highest volume.
In Zendesk, each team has their own queue, so they’re taking tickets from different channels within that queue and view. It’s made things a lot more stable. There are fewer cogs turning, so to speak, and we can be a lot more reliable. We’re not saying, “There’s one tool here for chat, one for phones, one for something completely different.” Things are streamlined and the team knows where to go.
What about volume breakdown? Do you promote one channel over another?
We take about 400-500 calls a day, roughly. It really varies on the day though. A Monday on the first day of the month can be bananas—more like 4,000-5,000.
Chat and email go hand-in-hand but also varies. Last month we did about 13,000 chat interactions. We’re seeing that grow at a rate of about 4 percent with the web widget and by communicating that it’s our fastest response time. We’re moving in the direction of being able to update that on a daily basis so that it will be super dynamic and change with the exact wait times by channel.
We just want to make it super easy to contact us. It shouldn’t be a challenge, and the customer shouldn’t have to go through multiple steps. If they have to dig around for a phone number, by the time they reach us we could have answered their question already. We just want the experience to be: “Hey, go to our Support webpage and find out what the quickest and best channel for you is.”
That’s pretty amazing—to marry channel preference with real-time wait times. What about knowledge management—who maintains your self-service content?
I want the whole team to be able to create help articles and documentation. We do have someone that’s dedicated to maintaining the FAQs and collecting documentation from platform teams when we release new tools for developers, but the whole team is creating internal documentation in Zendesk Guide.
At the end of the day, if they’re dealing with an issue and have the answer, right then and there, why not put that straight into Guide for someone else to use? We make it readily available so as the team encounters new issues, they can go and search Guide first. It’s working really, really well. Especially with our generalist model—there’s going to be questions that we don’t the answer to, but we’re continually learning and that keeps the team engaged.
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