Arbox was founded in 2015 by two CrossFitters who identified an emerging need for designated gym-management software. As a startup, they used a variety of tools to manage customer interactions, including email, spreadsheets and Live Person to manage their WhatsApp channel.
But as the business grew, these tools proved insufficient — the lack of a sophisticated and centralised customer service platform was creating extra work and negatively impacting the customer experience. While researching alternative methods of managing WhatsApp, Arbox came across Adelante and arranged a consultation to talk through their issues — leading to a successful partnership.
We sat down with Customer Manager Liad Avigal to get his take on the working relationship between Arbox and Adelante.
When Liad joined the company about three years ago as a customer manager, he saw a substantial challenge in customer service management. “When I arrived at the company, we were four employees, but it was clear that we were going to grow drastically and quickly,” he recalls, “When we found ourselves servicing more than 700 gyms and dealing with about 2000 customer communications a day, we understood that we needed a service that could better address our needs.”
“While using WhatsApp was great, it had several cons for us,” he adds, “Two fundamental things were missing: integration with email accounts and opening “tickets” (cards) for every communication.”
Liad remembers that first consultation with Adelante CEO Tamir Bashkin well, “First, Tamir asked me questions to get to know my business and my needs. Instead of immediately telling me what I needed, he took the time to be sure that he offered me the right product.” After this in-depth consultation, we advised Liad to start using Zendesk, which revolutionized the company’s customer service.
“The big advantage of using Zendesk’s system is the data and the ability to make reports via the system, which helps us to understand how well we are doing and what we can improve,” Liad emphasizes. “At the beginning, we had no direction. Numbers were a distant thing to us.”
The crucial data Liad focused on to improve Arbox’s customer service was divided into three key areas:
Evaluation of response quality – “We wanted to understand what was our percentage of single response to tickets – this told us how efficient we are to solve an issue with a single reply,” Liad explains, “Today we are at 55%, while at the beginning, we didn’t even know this figure —actually it was less than 40%.”
Satisfaction rating – “We need to know what our customers’ level of satisfaction is. Today we measure this using a dedicated survey,” he continues, “but the response rate is lower than we would like. We’re focusing on finding additional solutions that will help encourage our customers to respond to the survey and evaluate the quality of our service.”
Response time – “We also need to understand how much time passes before our customers receive the first response. Nowadays we are at 14 minutes on average – and we want to improve this figure continuously,” says Liad.
Adelante implemented Zendesk at Arbox last March, and, since then, Liad says the investment has repaid itself – and then some.
“Before we used Zendesk, we couldn’t understand what our most common customer service requests were. Once we received this information, we were able to ask our development team to provide technical solutions for our most common requests – which reduced our communication numbers by more than 20%,” he recalls.
In practice, these changes reduced the average amount of requests by about 40-50 every day. “That’s more or less the average amount of support requests an employee responds to a day, so just this change was able to spare us one employee, which is fantastic.”
The COVID-19 pandemic struck many of us, and one of the most affected groups was fitness coaches. Liad describes the immediate impact it had, saying, “Shortly after implementing the system, on March 15, all gyms were closed, and we immediately started to receive membership cancellation requests and questions about online classes,” he recalls.
“Using Zendesk helped us quickly make decisions during this time. It also helped us identify the busiest times and the most common customer service requests. Now, we knew how to schedule our team members and which Q&A articles to create for common questions to direct our customers to. During this time, we were forced to furlough employees, but thanks to the data we now had, we knew exactly when we could reemploy them again and make plans in advance.”
Liad believes that choosing Zendesk and Adelante’s service helped him improve customer service quality significantly at the company.
“It just went from 0 to 100. I, as the manager, finally know what goes on in my business, and without Adelante and Tamir, I couldn’t have achieved that. In the end, just as there are people who go to the gym and those who decide to take a personal trainer – we decided that we would be better off with a personal service. Adelante’s individual approach, knowledge, and experience greatly improved our processes. We would have wasted a lot of time and money by not going this route and trying to figure it all out ourselves.”
