How CarltonOne Engagement took its support platform digital with Freshworks

When Ontario-based CarltonOne Engagement was looking to sunset its email-based customer support system and move to a fully digital, scalable ticketing solution in 2014, it turned to Freshdesk. 

The provider of consumer and employee loyalty programs in more than 185 countries has stayed loyal to Freshworks products ever since. The company plans to leverage AI and chatbots to fully automate customer support, said Sandra Campbell, director of global support, in a fireside chat with Disha Gosalia, Freshworks VP of customer success, during the Freshworks User Network event held recently in Toronto. 

Here are some highlights of their conversation:

Could you share a little bit about how your world looked before Freshdesk?

We were using an email-based support platform before Freshdesk. It was really difficult to stay on top of things and hold the agents accountable. With a small team, our volume was much smaller and we had 200 open tickets a day.

It was not very scalable, so we began searching for a solution. We looked at a number of big companies in the space offering a ticket-based solution, and Freshdesk stood out because it was very user-friendly—and it’s really lived up to that. We can build things out and add things on the fly without having to reach out to our customer success manager unless it’s very complicated.

How was your experience with the implementation process?

We were able to bring a lot of our data from the old system with help from the Freshworks team. We were also able to build dashboards and set up automations. With the new solution, we can now handle more than 1,000 tickets per day. 

What are some of the KPIs you track, and how have the new dashboards been helpful to CarltonOne?

We’ve got several teams—proactive and reactive. Our order processing team receives email tickets from our suppliers with issues like order delays or address changes. We have a proactive outreach team and we can customize our dashboard to see if there are any regional trends. With this dashboard, we can pinpoint issues on which our teams can focus.

Our customer service team has their own dashboard where they can view regional nuances or see if there are any damaged items going out. It’s very easy for our agents to pick up on trends. Then we have dedicated teams who focus on one partner and view the number of inbound tickets or any problems for that partner.

You implemented Freshdesk nearly a decade ago. Is there a metric you’re most proud of?

First contact resolution and our average first response time. This year, we’re averaging a couple of hours for our first response time. Our SLA with our business partners is to have a response within a day. Sometimes, it’s now within two hours. We are going to build on bots next year. 

Tell us about some of the features on bots and chats you’re excited to try out and how that will help evolve your support experience.

About 60% of our tickets are first contact resolution, so I feel like this is a massive opportunity to leverage bots, where we don’t have to reach out to a third party and get an answer for someone. 

Any specific features from an AI standpoint that would be helpful for your team members?

A lot of our tickets require a lot of back and forth, so a summarizing tool would be very helpful and would save our agents time. It could also reduce errors and escalations. Tone and context assists could also be helpful. A large part of our team is based in the Philippines, while most of our clientele is based in North America, so our team navigates a lot of language and regional nuances.