Hometree’s 24/7 support team has automated scheduling using Surfboard, consolidating four different systems into one and replacing the need for spreadsheets.

Company: Hometree provides boiler protection to UK households with transparent pricing, an easy claim process and speedy fixes.

Industry: Insurance

Headquarters: London, UK

Features used:

• Intraday scheduling
• Forecasting (Zendesk and Zendesk talk) across phone, live chat and email
• Channel based staffing calculations
• Shift planning
• Time and attendance reporting
• Time off integrations

The challenge

Hometree operates in the boiler insurance space, meaning that when a customer calls to make a claim, it’s urgent.

High service levels attainment is critical as a customer service metric and their team works across four channels: phone, live chat, email and social media.

Prior to Surfboard, Hometree was scheduling on a number of spreadsheets. With three different managers organising team rotas, their spreadsheets became increasingly difficult to manage with a plethora of comments and version control issues.

Fairness is something extremely important to managers at Hometree. When deciding to work with Surfboard, the mission of making work more human resonated with Hometree’s Chief Commercial Officer Pranjal Arya.

They had looked at other scheduling software but didn’t want something that just optimises for resource allocation. With spreadsheets, they were manually having to eyeball whether shifts and tasks to ensure a fair allocation across the team beyond just coverage against channel requirements.