Recharge Payments elevates support with strong data and smart routing

Subscriptions are a huge part of people’s daily lives, providing everything from coffee, vitamin supplements, and meal kits to beauty products, clothing, and pet supplies. Launched in 2014, Recharge Payments got a jump on the trend and is now the leading subscriptions payments platform with a whopping 50 million subscribers. Around 16,000 ecommerce brands rely on Recharge’s unified suite of tools to grow their business and increase customer loyalty.

Just as Recharge is dedicated to helping merchants build strong relationships with subscribers, the company is devoted to delivering seamless service to its own B2B clients. Nearly half of Recharge’s 400 employees work as support agents across chat, web, and email. The company also offers a call back option instead of a direct phone line, because product queries often require advance research prior to engaging with customers. Businesses with Recharge’s premium offering can even schedule a Zoom video call for more personalized support.

Since 2017, Recharge has trusted Zendesk to power its support organization, which currently leverages the Suite Enterprise platform and Premier Essentials VIP support. That combination enables Recharge’s 150 support agents to handle around 7,000 tickets each month.

“I’ve always been a big Zendesk fan,” shares Ty Bailey, Vice President of Technical Support at Recharge. “Zendesk has really easy APIs and systems. That allows us to do a lot of things that you just can’t do on other systems.” Current integrations include KlausQA as a quality and sentiment tool, Assembled for workforce management, as well as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Slack connectivity.

Four teams for agile support

Recharge structures support and scales the business to satisfy clients of all sizes. “Our customer base has everything from a mom and pop fudge shop to giant subscription firms,” explains Bailey. “We have four teams to support these different personas.”

Knowledge and Enablement focuses on overall quality, deflective content, knowledge-centered strategy (KCS), and future deflection through AI. Innovation is a small yet dedicated development team that builds out customizations and automations at a platform level. The two front-facing teams handle requests according to segment. Universal Support provides a lot of scale and quick hit answering for the SMB and mid-market space, while Enterprise Support helps larger B2B brands with more complex needs.

The company benefits from having multiple teams of experts that can answer every type of ticket. It creates a more connected experience and ensures seamless handoffs between teams, which has helped propel the average CSAT to 92 percent.

Structuring support this way drives efficiency and agility, too. “Using a swarm ticket solving model and dynamic routing has allowed us to scale as we innovate quickly on the product side,” Bailey says. “Our response time has dramatically improved.”

The value of collaborative training

To set teams up for success, agents undergo a robust onboarding experience with multi-week enablement training, certification, and peer shadowing. Investing time and energy in training up front leads to smoother adoption and a better new agent experience, while creating a lot of collective knowledge at people’s fingertips.

Collaborative onboarding also provides new hires with a safety net as they learn. Instead of being measured on ticket volume or resolution time, the emphasis is on service quality and utility, so agents are motivated to help each other.

Good data makes support indispensable

By tracking the time spent on tickets, Recharge can generate more predictable requests for headcount or spend–which can ultimately help make the case for support during economic downturns. “How much of your team’s time is spent on tickets, on value drivers, on friction? Once you have a utilization metric, cuts can’t be made unless you have extra bandwidth,” says Bailey.

Positioning support as a value driver is crucial, because it’s often the first organization to take a hit when reductions need to be made. That’s why he believes “data is the most important card that support has to play within the company.”

“Support has more touchpoints with customers than any other organization–more than sales, product, or marketing. Support actually knows the customers better,” he adds. “If you utilize those touchpoints to drive data, you become indispensable to the other teams.”

“Get rid of busy work” to reduce costs

An essential way that Recharge gained efficiencies is by eliminating toil, the non-value work a team is doing. “In an ideal world, you’re answering novel questions for customers and driving stickiness and value,” shares Bailey. “Often, support is actually just covering the same topic again and again, or covering up for incomplete manual processes.”

The fix? Recharge aligns product and support through quarterly meetings to promote cross-functional problem solving. “We look at the biggest drivers of friction–our most common ticket type and our most time-consuming requests,” Bailey continues. “Then we do a deep dive on those topics to find solutions. Is it training? Is it documentation? Is it future changes? By having a very targeted scope and working with the product team, we can see the ticket volume and support costs go down while efficiency increases.”

Instead of solely judging the team based on how many tickets they turn, he prefers factoring in utilization satisfaction, because “it encourages team members to get rid of busy work.” In the past year and half, Bailey’s efforts to reduce toil have paid off. “We’ve seen positive changes in staff alignment and engagement reviews, while also lowering the cost of support as it relates to overall revenue. Our CSAT even increased by 7 percent across our most complex and top tier accounts,” he says.

Don’t just solve tickets, resolve the problem

While a data-driven approach to support serves Recharge well, Bailey also believes in going beyond the metrics. “I want us always focused on identifying the pain point for the client,” he says. “The job of the support agent isn’t to just solve a ticket. It’s to resolve the problem. How do you ensure that when you answer a question, that same question is never asked by another customer?”

Eliminating support altogether is an elusive goal, but Bailey insists that “the best support experience is one that doesn’t need to exist. You want to eliminate the need for them to come to you. The next steps are enhancement and innovation.”

Future proofing with self-service and AI

Enhancing self-service is on Bailey’s CX roadmap, so the team has been building out Recharge’s knowledge base with FAQs and consumable, AI agent-friendly elements. They’ve already seen adoption go up.
“If you make it easy for customers to solve the problem, they’ll go that route,” Bailey observes. “But if it’s hard for them to solve, they will make it your problem. Then you have to decide how to give them the self-serve tools they need.”

With an eye on innovation, Recharge hopes to introduce AI with messaging in the coming year, as they transition away from classic chat. “Our future is going to be an AI agent-fronted Zendesk messaging system,” says Bailey. “We’re going to get rid of all of the one-touch ticket questions and start focusing on value questions, to drive more sticky interactions.”