Orderin Achieves 1  Million Cost-Savings & Improves Ease of Customer Service With Freshchat

About Orderin

If you happen to be in South Africa and are in the mood for McDonald’s, chances are your delivery was made possible by Orderin. Orderin today is South Africa’s biggest e-logistics and on-demand delivery partner, but this avatar is fairly new. First started in 2012, Orderin was initially South Africa’s biggest online delivery service platform. Customers could order from over 1500 restaurants on the Orderin app and get their order delivered to their doorstep. But then the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread and the hospitality industry in South Africa was heavily impacted. 

We spoke to Nericia Mitchell, Head of Customer Success at Orderin, to understand how the company used Freshworks to rapidly pivot from a B2C to a B2B model to maintain their revenue stream at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Outgrowing the call centre setup

Customer experience has always been the ultimate goal for Orderin. Nericia explains, “Our main purpose at Orderin is to provide customers with a seamless end-to-end experience. Our customer support solutions have always been geared towards achieving that.  For a long time, this meant having a call centre setup, where customers could directly call us and speak to one of our customer support agents.” But as the company continued to scale and the incoming requests started to come in faster, the call centre system was unable to handle the demand. 

Speaking about the decision to move to an automated solution, Nericia says, “We simply could not afford to increase the headcount of our call centre. We needed a complete support channel that could help us increase our efficiency while still maintaining the customer experience standards we hold ourselves to. There were three main solutions we evaluated: Zoho, Zendesk, and Freshworks. With our startup DNA, the cost-effectiveness of Freshworks was what initially drew us in, but soon the advanced features and easy integrations were what kept us hooked.” The 24-hour support, easy integrations with Orderin’s APIs and customizable solutions made Freshworks the clear choice to revamp the support setup.

Orderin decided to deploy Freshchat and Freshdesk, to handle their ever-increasing customer demand. In a few months, as COVID-19 restrictions were imposed across the country, these solutions would become critical to the success of the company’s new business model. 
 

Rethinking the business model during COVID-19

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants were forced to shut down and this meant that 95% of Orderin’s business was now not operational. Orderin had to expand their services - and fast.

Within a matter of a few months, the company launched its new services geared towards order fulfillment and management for restaurants. Using its existing resources and expertise, Orderin now provides services for restaurants that encompass order management, tracking and delivery for restaurants.
 

Switching from phone calls to AI-powered messaging

Such a rapid shift required an internal setup that was agile enough to handle the transition. With Freshworks, Orderin was in a stronger position to promote its new model. Nericia explains, “With our revenue streams impacted, our immediate priority was to control costs as we moved to the new model. For this to happen, customer support had to change from a cost-centre to a revenue-centre. Freshchat and Freshdesk, helped us manage a larger volume of queries with a smaller workforce, thus bringing down overall operational costs.”

In phase 1, Orderin moved from a call centre to a messaging experience powered by Freshchat. This automatically increased efficiency. Rather than having to attend to only one query at a time, agents could now respond to up to 3 queries concurrently, increasing productivity threefold. Incoming  messages would be converted into Freshdesk tickets, which increased visibility among management on exactly what type of queries were coming in and not just the number. This uncovered an important insight. “When we analysed the incoming customer queries, we noticed that there was a lot of repetition among them. For example, there were numerous questions on refunds or order tracking. These didn’t have to be attended to by an agent each time.” 

This led to phase 2: deployment of bots. Orderin began to use Freshchat’s chabots (powered by Freddy AI) to resolve common customer queries. Even for more complex queries which require a human agent, bots reduce the handling time by gathering all the required customer information beforehand. This means that when the agent does get involved in a ticket, details such as the customer name and order number are already available to them.

Strengthening the value proposition

Freshchat and Freshdesk worked in tandem to improve agent productivity, but that was not the only benefit Orderin witnessed. “We needed to offer best-in-class customer service experiences to our clients such as McDonalds. Our service capabilities had to exceed industry standards. With Freshworks, we were able to achieve just that. Messaging and bots opened up our business prospects and definitely contributed to our revenue pipeline.”

As Nericia explains, the tools provided by Freshworks were also critical in helping their team move to a remote work setup almost overnight. “Moving from an on-premise centre to remote workspaces was a challenge. We had to ensure that the team’s morale was high and that we continued to exceed SLAs so our customers would not be impacted. Since Freshworks’ products were available remotely, our agents didn’t experience a huge shift in the processes.” This continuity in customer service quality helped Orderin pivot smoothly at a time when the business was undergoing a rapid transformation.

Results from Freshworks 

Despite being in a difficult situation at the beginning of the pandemic, Orderin has now emerged stronger than ever. With Freshworks, the company has noticed dramatic improvements in customer satisfaction, agent productivity, and revenue. 

Within a span of just 1 year, Orderin has achieved the following results:

• Cost-saving: With Freshworks’ cloud platform, Orderin’s customer support team was able to work remotely with ease. This saved the company 1 million rand in operational costs! 
• Resolution time: Average resolution time decreased from 45 minutes to just 5 minutes - a decrease of almost 90%
• Response time: Average first-response time decreased from 20 minutes to barely 1 minute
• Query deflection: Of the 60,000+ customer queries Orderin receives, an incredible 50% is now deflected by bots

These astounding results have certainly caught the eye of some of the biggest brands in South Africa. Bolstered by its strong support capabilities, Orderin now counts McDonalds and Pick n Pay as some of its top B2B customers.