How The Farmer's Dog Increased First Call Resolution 50% With UJET

By UJET

The Farmer's Dog was started after Brett Podolsky’s battle to cure stomach issues of his Rottweiler, Jada. He quickly realized just how broken the commercial pet food industry was, even products advertised as “organic” and “natural” proved to be heavily processed. It was only after a fresh, home-cooked diet, recommended by his veterinarian, that Jada began to improve and was eventually cured.

Having witnessed first-hand the power of fresh food, he teamed up with Jonathan Regev to rethink the industry from the ground up and create a product they wished had existed for their own dogs (and dogs everywhere).

In 2014, the pair started making freshly prepared food and hand-delivering meals to customers from a cramped Brooklyn, New York kitchen. Two years later, The Farmer’s Dog officially launched and the company continues to provide fresh, healthy food to dogs across the United States.

Challenges

Dogs are an important part of every family and The Farmer’s Dog’s customer experience team also works to educate its customers. The company offers a subscription service so it’s important for the team to offer an authentic experience and maintain long-lasting relationships with its customers.

The Farmer’s Dog top priority is each dog’s health and providing a seamless and effortless experience. This means providing same day support on nutrition, feeding, and subscription questions and even connecting with a customer’s veterinarian when necessary. The long-term goal is to offer all the information that a dog owner needs to educate themselves about the health of their four-legged family member.

“Our focus is to optimize before scaling so every order, every delivery, every customer issue is handled in the most efficient way - improving agent handle times, first response time, process to resolution, and ultimately customer satisfaction.” - Molly Garraway, Senior Manager of Customer Experience

When it came to customer support, The Farmer’s Dog wanted to decrease average handle times, first contact resolution, and average tickets per customer.

The first step was replacing its voice platform. Limited options caused The Farmer’s Dog to transfer voice calls directly into voicemail so agents could open the right tool and aggregate customer information without asking the customer to be on extended holds.

Without a robust voice channel, important and essential conversations with prospective customers were being lost. In addition, The Farmer’s Dog wasn’t able to foster deeper relationships with its current subscription customers.

Previous customer satisfaction and retention were reliant on each agent’s knowledge, critical thinking and resolution ability.

Solution

To solve its IVR problem, The Farmer’s Dog decided to partner with UJET. The agent-friendly platform and “easy-to-use, but powerful features” like call transfers, call recording, and whisper option were key factors. These tools allowed The Farmer’s Dog to train and raise the efficiency of its team and provide enhanced service. UJET’s optional website widget with AI integration also was “integral to the decision.”

“It was clear that UJET valued its customers with the same high esteem we do.” - Molly Garraway, Senior Manager of Customer Experience

The Farmer’s Dog customer experience team is lean, so flexibility was key. The company’s new IVR solution was able to connect customers with agents, transfer customers quickly and provide a more efficient way to resolve issues.

Customer integration allowed The Farmer’s Dog to aggregate customer information before answering calls. Instead of the previously directing customers straight to voicemail, agents were able to familiarize themselves with customer information before picking up a call and reduce call times. Since more interactions were over IVR, this also minimized back-and-forth email communication where long threads caused customer frustration.

Results

The Farmer’s Dog saw large improvements in its customer support after integrating UJET. Customer issue resolution and average call handle time decreased from a 20-minute average down to five minutes. This was with inbound volume doubling and 20 percent of customer interactions coming from voice calls. Call pickup wait times decreased to under 45 seconds in 80 percent of cases which was a significant decrease from The Farmer’s Dog’s original solution to queue through voicemail. The improvement to service improved so dramatically that The Farmer’s Dog saw the number of interactions decrease by 50 percent.

Many of The Farmer’s Dog’s customers “have proclaimed how great is it to connect with a human and not a robot.” Inbound volume increased by 100 percent with the number of tickets per customer decreasing and a drop-in repeat contacts.

UJET assisted The Farmer’s Dog in optimizing its customer experience department. The improved efficiency allowed The Farmer’s Dog to “explore additional hours of availability, new avenues, and opportunities to engage customers and prospective.”

“UJET allows my team to take matters into their own hands - every agent feels more empowered and capable of handling a customer’s questions or issues.” - Molly Garraway, Senior Manager of Customer Experience

The platform allows The Farmer’s Dog customer experience team to handle the influx of customers and allows management to be more hands off. This time is used to “dig into the data” from calls and focus on continuing the company’s goal of providing a seamless customer experience.

Conclusion

The Farmer’s Dog previous voice platform couldn’t provide all the options that the company was looking for. The limited capabilities lead The Farmer’s Dog to find stopgap solutions while limiting the positive customer experience that it was trying to grow.

Once UJET’s platform was introduced, The Farmer’s Dog was able to realign back to its original goal - to provide the best customer service experience possible as it improves and enhances its website and FAQ. Agents are now able to resolve issues faster and with more precision because of customer company history. A feature that The Farmer’s Dog support team finds very useful is the call transfer feature to send customers to different agents seamlessly.

Creating efficient workflows has allowed The Farmer’s Dog to provide the customer support it wants. Customers are able to communicate issues and agents have the ability to deep dive when necessary and resolve any possible issues.

The Farmer’s Dog proves the benefit of an IVR channel for customer support. With a passionate customer base, the company is able to manage its customer service needs as the support channels grow. And with the scalability of platform, UJET is there to help.