Challenge

Focus on Consumer Cybersafety and Innovation

Cybersafety has been an evolving concern for many industries as phishing, ransomware, and artificial intelligence continue to place individuals and organizations at risk. Creating technology that stays ahead of the threats is not an easy task, especially if it can’t get delivered to the end-user efficiently and on time.

Our customer, a cybersecurity leader in consumer protection, focused on empowering people to safely navigate the cyberspace. Its powerful product suite offers device security, identity protection, and online privacy applications that ensure confidence in digital interactions. When it comes to identity theft, rapid response is what matters the most. They pride themselves on providing real-time exposure mitigation solutions to its customers, so they can rest assured their data remains safe and secure.

Achieving real-time customer response is hard without a well-planned communication strategy. They have long struggled with a lengthy, multitouch response process in the absence of an automated omni-channel system that would allow scheduling service interactions in a timely manner. Additionally, scheduling based on staff availability was complicated by user-prone manual data entry and back-and-forth email communication. The inability to manage existing cases effectively due to missed and delayed appointments prompted the management team to identify the need for a tool capable of turning all aspects of the scheduling process into a streamlined customer experience.

Solution

A Streamlined Road To Success

The company was keen to take advantage of all that SUMO’s integrated scheduling platform had to offer, and the SUMO development team helped to get the project off to a flying start. First, the company identified the need to sync SUMO calendar with the existing Salesforce calendar. As a result, the SUMO platform allowed full visibility into staff availability, even among team members who weren’t using SUMO’s native calendar. This led to error-free and real-time scheduling for customers who needed an immediate interaction with the support agent. The all-in-one calendar view clearly laid out all customer interactions and made personalized experience across devices and time zones a reality.

The new SUMO Platform has also proven to be invaluable for the existing cases. It not only reduced scheduling mistakes associated with follow-up appointments but also shortened the support cycle by offering first available time slots based on staff availability. Additionally, customers were able to self-schedule 24/7 365 from any device and location. At the end of the project, their support team found that SUMO lived up to its reputation for the ease of integration and intuitive interface.

Results

Moving Upwards with SUMO

Their company has fully adopted SUMO’s omni-channel appointment scheduler and experienced first-hand the difference it made. The support team is now able to define and update its availability for quick real-time responses without having to manually schedule calls and send multiple email reminders. What previously derailed team members from effectively performing their duties got eliminated allowing them to focus on providing excellent customer service.

One particularly useful feature of the SUMO application is its Analytics Builder. They found this smart reporting tool extremely helpful in providing visibility into appointment volume trends and staff utilization. The analytics team is now able to create custom dashboards and leverage predefined reports to provide a valid ground for making intelligent data-driven decisions.

Going forward, the company plans to continue using SUMO for its real-time scheduling and staff availability planning. They believe that this partnership will greatly improve existing processes and enhance its ability to better communicate with each customer.

Challenge

Apparent Need for Process Improvement

In today’s global economy, digital transformation has been a top priority for a vast majority of enterprises, including technology companies. Many organizations have already embraced digital transformation as a way to streamline communication and enhance patient care. As operations migrate to cloud-based applications, companies are able to process data faster while improving key business functions such as virtual care, remote health assistance, and staff availability.

Our customer is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance, human resources, planning, and analytics. With noticeable clients such as Quicken Loans and AstraZeneca, they stay at the forefront of innovation, revolutionizing the workspace and helping companies achieve long-term economic success.

While providing excellent service to its clients, the company uses every opportunity to improve its own processes and help employees achieve high levels of job satisfaction. Recently, the company saw an immediate need for amplifying its scheduling flow in order to establish efficiencies and streamline interactions between customers and support teams. The need for an automated omni-channel appointment scheduling software became apparent and they utilized SUMO to automate calendar management to help employees get more organized.

Solution

Overcoming the Challenges

The company has long struggled with scheduling inefficiencies that often resulted in cancellations and frustrations from customers and team members. Customers’ inability to schedule their own appointments was one of the main setbacks. The need to improve the flow between clients and the support team became the number one task for immediate implementation.

As predicted, they recognized all the on-boarding support that SUMO offered. In a matter of just a few weeks, SUMO’s development team revamped the entire scheduling system with the brand new user interface that immediately allowed customers to self-schedule appointments based on available time slots and resources. Additionally, support consultants gained the ability to easily manage multiple appointments for each case.

As one of the main goals for using automated scheduling software was to simplify the user experience, SUMO’s development team implemented an intuitive design that offered the ability to email invitations for support calls with just one click. Clients appreciated the simplicity of the scheduling process which resulted in a considerable decline in missed and delayed calls. In addition to user interface improvements such as Outlook integration, the introduction of a no-reply address for automated scheduling reduced manual tasks and resulted in improved time utilization of the entire support team.

Another notable difference introduced by SUMO was the ability to archive inactive requests and hide them from the calendar view. This advancement helped to declutter the calendar and created more space for upcoming appointments. As a result, clients reported a higher level of satisfaction with the support team’s flexibility and responsiveness.

Finally, SUMO’s automated platform made it much easier to repurpose past invitations for handling new requests. At the end of the project, they reported up to 25% less time scheduling new meetings and following up to reschedule existing calls.

Results

Hitting the Ground Running SUMO’s Help

Since partnering with SUMO, the Fortune 100 company has achieved the goal of fully automating its scheduling process. Support consultants now have the power to manage customized tasks while giving customers the freedom to schedule, modify, and cancel meeting appointments at their own convenience regardless of the time zone. As a result, the company saw improved customer and employee satisfaction. In 2020, they was ranked in the Top 5 on the Fortune Magazine’s List of the Top 100 Companies to Work For based on an employee survey of satisfaction.

The company’s management team was particularly impressed by SUMO’s analytics tool that provided full transparency into meeting activity such as the number of scheduled and rescheduled appointments. With over 50 dashboard templates, the management team is now able to monitor and track staff utilization levels and identify gaps for further planning and improvements. Looking ahead, the company wants to expand the use of SUMO Scheduler across the entire organization and plans to achieve even better results in the future.

Blasted with critical reviews and facing thousands of dollars in losses, this SaaS company knew it urgently needed an upgraded scheduling process. The solution went even further

THE CHALLENGE:

The client, a SaaS company responsible for providing support & product training to customers through client administrators, was managing incoming training requests using Outlook, Excel, and email.

While these are fine tools, the process of manually adding critical client data while searching for available appointment hours was quickly becoming a concern.

Both customers and client administrators were struggling with long wait times. Multiple appointment initiation points—such as email, phone, and website— had to be monitored around the clock for clients across different time zones.

Additionally, clients were being pushed to request appointments through the SaaS company’s designated Customer Portal, adding yet another initiation point.

Bombarded by customer support issues and facing huge losses, the company wanted to reduce wait times by decreasing its appointment initiation points.

However, this would also reduce incoming requests (and thus, income). Searching for a solution that would overhaul the process without leading to immediate losses, the SaaS company approached SUMO.

THE OBJECTIVES:

After conducting an in-depth audit of the business, including interviews with the workforce & anonymous clients, major pain points were discovered.

To address those issues effectively, SUMO suggested the following feature implementations for the SaaS company’s appointment scheduling strategy:

– Unified Appointment View: all initiation points should be up-to-date
– Revamped Infrastructure: each representative should access correct data
– Reminder Engine: clients should automatically be informed 
– Designated Access: only the administrators should confirm appointments

THE SOLUTION:

First and foremost, the SaaS company was afraid to lose clients if they went through with their original plan: decreasing appointment initiation points.

Instead of removing those initiation points (and jeopardizing a revenue stream), SUMO created a transparent Multi-Calendar, fully synced for the clients
and the administrators based on each scheduled appointment.

This way, clients could continue using the existing initiation points, while each recorded appointment would automatically be added to the Multi-Calendar.

Secondly, SUMO created bespoke Case Management features, allowing each customer’s pre-recorded preferences to be quickly accessible for the consultants, enabling them to focus on customer service rather than data scrolling.

Furthermore, the new Reminder Engine would automatically send reminders
to the customers when their appointment was approaching, freeing up the consultants.

Lastly, a brand new interface with designated access allowed the administrators to log new case details more effectively, while an Automatic Trigger to pull in client contact information or assigned reps into a scheduled meeting kept everyone on track.

THE RESULTS: 

SUMO Scheduler simplified the booking process, giving the global support team a single tool built within the Salesforce platform to manage appointments.

The Multi-Calendar view now provides a bird’s eye view over all incoming (and scheduled) appointments, allowing consultants to focus on more dynamic time-management and customer service.

As such, the global support department can now view Outlook for Salesforce, Salesforce events and SUMO self-scheduled appointments on one single calendar.

The Reminder Engine has eliminated the potential for double-booked or missed appointments, and thus the client administrators now have greater flexibility (and designated access) when managing their accounts.

By implementing the SUMO solutions, the SaaS company’s support team has drastically decreased wait times & after call work times, greatly improving the customer experience and satisfaction rates (they surveyed it!).

THE FUTURE: 

The SaaS travel leader has reported increased productivity through the new, streamlined SUMO solution, with administrators & consultants appreciating the all-in-one customer engagement solution.

Beyond customer experience, the company has reported an increase in customer appointments, especially self-scheduled appointments through the new, streamlined Multi Calendar interface. Today, our client continues to provide top-notch service to its 100+ clients worldwide, all while trusting SUMO with its client relationship management.