How Support Self Serve empowered UC to improve experience and lower cost
By —Parth Mahajan(Engineer, Supply Team)
How many times you’ve faced an issue while connecting with customer care through help centers only to sometimes be stuck in a waiting queue or get pacified by being asked to wait a little more time?
But what if, rather than asking them to call and wait for a response, the help center could help with most of these queries without any customer care executive being involved in the entire process? Let’s go through a few of these issues in Urban Company's context to understand better . . .
Why am I not getting enough jobs?
UC Partners, despite having marked their availability, when sitting ideally will try to connect with a help-center agent on “why aren’t they getting a job”. There could have been various reasons like demand being low on that day in their area (hyper-local areas called hub), some issues with their profile to be eligible to get a job like low rating, credits not being enough, etc. The agent will usually refer to the information provided on our internal UC dashboard and communicate exactly the same thing. This would increase the cost of the company as the agent would call the partner back for the issue raised by him/her.
The idea, hence, was to create personalized views for partners making our system more transparent and helping them figure out exactly why they are not getting enough jobs. Usage of these views should not only pacify their anxiety about low jobs but also help them understand the exact issues.
For a successful diagnosis, we had to process millions of data points for our partners in a day, the majority of which were generated by our matchmaking engine. To keep our data consistent and reliable, the idea was to consume these data points via Kafka events and pre-process them for faster runtime access. Also, UC as a business supports a number of different services in multiple geographies across the globe. While building this, we aimed to develop a platform to configure self-serve options based on the different dimensions while making sure any tweaks that need to be made should not consume any dev bandwidth and should be driven by our product managers entirely.
This is how the self-serve works
Impact
- In monetary terms, we were able to save 5% of total partner support cost with just this self-serve by saving on agent time and call costs.
- Partner contact rate related to “Not getting enough jobs” dropped by a whopping ~50%. Now, the agents can solve more serious queries which can’t be exposed to partners.
Why am I not getting job notifications?
UC partners have complained this many times that they didn’t receive job notification on time and thus were not able to accept it and the job went to some other partner. Or they didn’t hear the notification sound and thus didn’t act on it and in turn, lost an earning opportunity. Most of the time this happens because partners would not have an ideal combination of settings turned on/off. Agents will guide them through correcting those settings and for more than 95% of partners, these issues then get resolved.
We started capturing these settings from our partner’s device and compared them with standard settings and notified them if something was off. Also, we added a self-serve (or self-diagnose) flow in our help center which will get the standard settings from our systems and compare them with a partner’s device and give them the exact steps on how to fix these settings.
Impact
- We saw around ~80% reduction in getting “job notification” related bugs
- Notification delivery (within 1 min) increased by ~10pp
What next?
We are converting most of the help-center options into self-serve flows and if the user is not satisfied with the resolution, they can raise a request and get connected with an agent over chat (or callback). A few of the other cases are:
For Customers:
- Partner is not assigned yet
- When will I get my refund?
- I want a different professional to be assigned
- Refund basis on feedback given on a poor service
- Change the packages selected in the request
For Partners:
- The customer is not reachable when I am near the customer’s location
- Cancel the job because of various reasons like an Incorrect address/personal reasons/work being out of scope/a customer asking to cancel
- Status of payout
- The rating is not updated
Our next blog will cover a few of the use cases and their technicalities. Stay tuned!!
The team behind self-serve flows
Parth Mahajan Virendra Singh Diya Jaiswal Manuj Dixit Siddharth Kumar Durjai Sethi
About the Author
Parth Mahajan has been working for the Urban company for more than 4 years. He started his journey by helping UC in scaling and solving problems for the match-making team. Currently, he is putting efforts toward UC’s partner app experience. He loves to read and you’ll find him playing PC games in his free time
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