tink

The Situation

Founded in Berlin in 2016, tink is the first comparison and advice platform and marketplace for products that make your home smarter. As early advocates of these game-changing technologies, tink’s founders wanted to offer accessible products that offered real value to consumers, while being easy to install and attractively-priced. 

tink was founded on the principle of always delivering the optimal solution for customers. This includes the customer service they provide. The team is laser-focused on making sure customers receive fast and knowledgeable responses, while the leadership team is equally committed to coaching the team to a high caliber in order to maximize customer satisfaction.

The Challenge

As a rapidly growing business, tink was hindered by its legacy customer service platform, Zendesk, that relied on a ticketing approach. They faced many operational inefficiencies, with symptoms like a large backlog, rampant cherry-picking, unequal agent workload, copy-paste, and manual processes topping the list of grievances. They also felt their ticketing system was not scalable, as administrative tasks and changes were time—and cost—consuming, requiring IT to make even the smallest alteration. Overall, they felt they were spending too much time and effort adjusting, modifying, and setting up their existing ticketing solution and not enough time focusing on delivering the quality customer service they so wanted to build their brand on.

The team realized they needed a platform they could implement and manage themselves, without involving the IT department, as well as one that could give them the flexibility to scale as they needed. Given the rapid pace of their hiring, seasonal peaks,  and geographic expansion, they also needed an intuitive platform that would allow them to train and onboard their new team members quickly and efficiently.

The Solution

After evaluating several solutions on the market, the tink team selected Dixa in August of 2021. Using Dixa’s knowledge base, they were able to onboard their entire seasonal team of 80+ agents in less than two weeks. With Dixa, the team gained access to up-to-date documentation and customer data so agents could help customers immediately and with greater accuracy. Clear queue structures routed conversations to the right team—Payments, E-mobility, Compliance—upgrading the agent experience to a clear and efficient way of supporting customers.

Using data to route to the best team member

tink’s dropshipping model meant that order-related inquiries needed to be routed in a certain way to avoid connecting customers to the wrong support team. This was resolved by manager-friendly integrations with Magento and Google Forms, which allowed for logistics data to be used in setting up better queue structures. Additionally, routing based on order and drop-shipping data automated how agents picked up and handled conversations. Instead of spending time cherry-picking conversations, agents found themselves working more productively as conversations were proactively offered to them based on their skills and knowledge.

Integrated knowledge base 

With Dixa, tink documented more processes and knowledge than ever before, making it available to the entire customer support team. Automated knowledge management capabilities ensured that eCommerce, dropshipping, and return policies were always up-to-date, reducing the probability of poor customer service caused by inaccurate information being communicated to customers.

The automated knowledge management, creation, and maintenance capabilities built into Dixa helped speed up training time for students and seasonal employees, one of tink’s greatest challenges during peak season.

Going from good to great with the entire Dixa Conversational Customer Service Platform 

After the initial success of Dixa’s core customer service functionality and knowledge base, tink expanded its use of Dixa—adding the powerful AI-driven chatbot so customers could find the answers they were looking for 24/7, with no wait time, as well as adding Dixa Discover to gather team performance insights and improve agent performance over time.

Rapid channel set-up and success

Interactions with customers across channels are funneled into one conversation in Dixa, with a persistent history that agents can refer to at any point. With all channels built into one platform, and an identical channel setup structure, tink was able to rapidly expand its customer service footprint – and launched WhatsApp and Dixa Messenger in under two weeks. 

Dixa’s chatbot functionality was added in 2022 to help the team cope with the Black Friday peak. Tink has since seen self-service rates remain high which has given their team members back valuable time they can use to focus on those customers that need a little extra attention. The chatbot integration with the core platform means conversations are handed over seamlessly to an agent and customers don’t have to repeat themselves.

Analytics improves the customer experience

In 2022, tink also added Dixa Discover, a powerful suite of analytics tools, to their arsenal, making a switch from Stella Connect. Dixa Discover, particularly the Quality Assurance feature, gives the team greater visibility and insight into customer service performance and helps the tink team spot the gaps and problem areas. These are then immediately improved upon, directly impacting the customer experience—and, ultimately—resulting in a higher CSAT. This has created a more engaged team that’s focused on improving their impact on the customer experience.

What’s next? 

tink are continuously looking for ways to improve their customer service experience and have a number of exciting initiatives in the works they hope to complete before their next peak season where they would traditionally need to bring additional agents onboard.

Continue to Optimize Dixa Messenger

tink aims to benefit more from the capabilities of Dixa Messenger by integrating their knowledge base and chatbot directly within the widget. This enhancement is expected to further assist the team in minimizing repetitive inquiries.

Improve Internal Knowledge Base for Quicker Onboarding

The team also wants to improve the internal knowledge base for large inventory products to help onboard and ramp up new agents. This will help the team improve efficiency and customer satisfaction with quick, accurate answers.

Expand Use of Quality Assurance and Team Performance

tink will be taking a deeper look at Dixa’s Quality Assurance feature to help them understand the holistic view of their customer service operations performance. They’ll be able to customize Dixa’s QA across all communication channels for all teams. Centralized results give managers and agents quick and easy access to insights for greater transparency and actionable information for true improvements. Empower agents with transparent feedback.

Considering Outsourcing 

In order to keep their service standards at the highest levels during peak seasons, the team are also considering outsourcing to a BPO in the future for additional flexibility.