The Situation
Formerly known as mytaxi, FREE NOW is the biggest multi-service mobility provider in Europe, operating in 100+ European cities. They are on a journey to make urban mobility better for passengers, drivers and communities, and to help cities to thrive.
In such a competitive space, their focus is to become a greener first-choice for their users. It’s all about creating a great customer experience for drivers and passengers alike.
The Challenge
In 2019, Karina Schack worked for Kapten (part of the FREE NOW group) as an Operations Quality Manager. When FREE NOW merged with Kapten in July 2020, Karina moved into her new role: Transition Manager.
FREE NOW had 9 customer service teams, one for each country of operations. Their goal was to create two central customer service hubs, one in Lisbon and one in Athens, to handle all ‘Tier 1’ requests. These requests did not require local knowledge, for example Cancellation Fee query. With tier 1 requests handled more efficiently , each local team could focus on the more challenging requests, ones where specific country laws and procedures need to be taken into consideration.
In 2020, Karina took on many new responsibilities. She is now part of the team that builds, structures and implements the strategy for customer service at a global scale. “My role is broad, it changes on a weekly basis. It’s a fast-paced environment with a startup mentality – I can be working on anything from process alignment to liaising with local markets and the hub”, says Karina.
FREE NOW’s biggest challenges were threefold:
- To centralize all their data and unify their support so that, no matter what country users were contacting from, their experience was of the highest quality
- To empower their team leads to take ownership of the performance of their team
- To implement Quality Assurance for the hub and for each local market rather than use Google Sheets in order to improve reporting
The Solution
And this is exactly where FREE NOW started, with Quality Assurance (QA). After traialing another solution that couldn’t cover all of their needs, Karin was introduced to Dixa’s Quality Assurance. She quickly found that there was “a huge difference” between Dixa’s calibration functionality and the depth of the reporting around reviews in comparison to other QA platforms.
We were first interested in Dixa’s Quality Assurance. We were please to see how easy and smart it was.”
Nabil Kachour
Director of Service Operations
FREE NOW
The fact that Dixa was a 3-in-1 solution also played a part: it’s much easier to not have to deal with multiple different technology providers for different workflows. “In terms of QA, we did see a massive time reduction from using Google Sheets to using Dixa. And thinking about QA from a more central perspective, Dixa is a very important part of that: doing it in Google Sheets across 9 markets and having an aligned process is not a task I would want to take on!,” says Karina.
Of course, the time saving translated into significant efficiency boosts – but the real value in an analytical QA platform is using the data to improve processes and operations.
The reporting on QA in Dixa’s Quality Assurance was one of the things that I really liked. To be able to break down QA scores by channel, contact reason, handling time really helps you get insightful answers to important questions like ‘what knowledge gaps are there in the team?’ and ‘what processes are too complex?’ and take action.”
Karina Schack
Transition Manager
FREE NOW
With the QA aspect of the centralization project complete, FREE NOW had to turn their attention to the team managers. “We wanted to go from not being very data-driven in customer service, to really start becoming just that – and we thought that Dixa would help us facticity that (transition)”, said Karina.
Before Dixa’s Business Insights, FREE NOW’s team leads had varying levels of experience and knowledge when it came to metrics and reporting. They had one customer service analyst that would build dashboards and view for all team leads on Zendesk Explore. If anyone wanted to know about data, they would ask this person because they either didn’t have people trained properly or they lacked knowledge on Zendesk.
Dixa’s Business Insights had the impact that they had hoped for: team leads were empowered to take ownership of their data and activity, and were able to conduct complex analysis themselves. It worked in two ways: there were people that wanted to be more self-sufficient and were good with data, but they didn’t have the time or the experience t; and there were those that were reluctant to take ownership because they were not used to working with numbers. Now both types of team members had the right tools.
We’re getting everybody to be data-driven and to own their data. We’ve seen a massive shift towards that in the last few months and that’s been very good. Now, I can ask any manager ‘why is your CSAT dropping’ and they can go and find the answer without having to rely on anyone else’. It’s turned managers into analysts. We’ve empowered them to do their own digging and drive performance”
Karina Schack
Transition Manager
FREE NOW
One of the hidden gems in Dixa’s Business Insights was the ‘working hours’ and the ‘interactions per hour’ metrics. Karina explains, “when we have really low volume, it’s really hard to assess whether people are being unproductive.” With worked hours and interactions per hour, they can compare multiple people in the same territory and see how their hours compare.
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