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CX Innovators: On-the-go support with Roadie, a UPS Company

At a time when most apps are making it hard to reach live agents, Roadie's commitment to great CX means optimizing self-service and human support.

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In our CX Innovators blog series, we highlight industry leaders and our partners to explore their commitment to providing exceptional customer experiences.

Roadie is a platform that could be described as the “Uber” of package delivery, for crowdsourced pickups and deliveries. Roadie has two categories of users—drivers and senders. Most customer support interactions go through the Roadie platform, so there are significant opportunities to use digital tools, technologies, and guidance to help users. Nevertheless, live agent support has been extremely important to the Roadie business model from day one, and the company is committed to providing outstanding customer experience by maintaining that philosophy. We spoke with Matt Finger, Head of Customer Experience at Roadie, a UPS Company.

Ubiquity: How was customer experience baked into the Roadie business model?

Matt Finger: We’ve known from Day One that the business we are in requires support—sometimes a lot of support. We know that when someone contacts us, they likely need immediate assistance on an active delivery. So we have to be prepared. The truth is, many apps are actually designed to make it difficult to contact real people. That was never our plan. It’s built into our DNA that we want to be helpful and responsive, and I think our users appreciate that.

Exceeding customer expectations

Ubiquity: What is innovative about the way Roadie improves user experiences?

Matt: We need to “be” where our users want us to be. We need to be on the right channel when and where they need us. We try to answer as many questions as possible with helpful resources that users can reference to improve deflection rates. We want to provide solutions seamlessly. If they do have to chat or email or call, we want to know why they’re contacting us before we connect.

Ubiquity: What are the challenges for delivering exceptional customer experiences?

Matt: Consumer expectations are higher than ever and attention spans are shorter than ever. Those are significant forces to stay ahead of. Our goal is to consistently exceed expectations. It’s hard, and it keeps getting harder and harder. But we’re always striving toward that.

Ubiquity: How do you respond to these challenges?

Matt: We always have to have people available, but we also want to use technology whenever possible. The goal is always to make the contact and interaction as frictionless as possible. We are primarily app-centered, so most interactions are “technology-first.” That gives us an opportunity to leverage data we collect to anticipate issues and be prepared with solutions when our users need assistance.

The best of both worlds:

Balancing technology and human intervention

Ubiquity: How do you manage live agent resources most efficiently?

Matt: We believe that the user onboarding process for new app users is critical. We do our best to make sure users know what to expect on the platform. We have detailed self-help content (FAQs, videos, onboarding written support articles) that answer the most common issues any user will encounter. Our CSAT and ticket monitoring tell us what resources are the most helpful—and what we still need to create. In addition, we supply self-help tools and technologies for our users to handle issues without a live agent getting involved. We use these technologies not just to reduce agent need, but to create a better user experience, because more and more users want technology to solve their problems without having to interact with somebody.

Ubiquity: Why are live agents still valuable to Roadie?

Matt: We want to be available to help our users in a friendly and efficient manner when they need us. The best user experience still frequently requires a live agent, especially for more complex issues. That’s the key—we want our users coming back to our platform again and again. And we want to be able to serve them as quickly as possible and give them the best experience. If a live agent is the way to do that we want to have the best ones available to help.

“Our business is growing, so we are constantly thinking about how we can innovate with our core technology and new technologies. And we add new products and features that we think will improve the customer experience as quickly as possible. How do we think about all those offerings where if the technology isn’t just right, that will lead to user dissatisfaction? It’s not easy, but that’s just part of the ongoing calculations that we do.”

Matt Finger

Head of Customer Experience, Roadie, a UPS Company

Ubiquity: Can you teach empathy to agents?

Matt​: We had a lot of discussion with Ubiquity about this. You can, and broadly, it starts with finding the right people. You have to have the right mindset to be in customer support, especially these days, when users are more demanding than ever. We are contacted often when somebody needs something or something has gone wrong. So put all those things together, and it takes a special kind of person. We spend a lot of time upfront making sure that empathy and that mindset is there with any person we bring on, and then also that they fit into our culture.

Ubiquity: How does technology help you anticipate user needs?

Matt: If a user is chatting or calling and logged in to the app, we know who they are. So then we have that context for the agent before they engage with the user. This can provide the agent with some knowledge about what the user might be calling about. To achieve frictionless contacts, we have to be in the right channel, ready for the interaction, and understand the context.

Ubiquity: How do you choose the best channel of communication?

Matt: We assume that the way the user is contacting us is the way they want to be contacted. But if a user asks us to contact them in a certain way, we listen. We don’t store preferences because preferences can change quickly.

Ubiquity: What might be unique about Roadie user and customer expectations?

Matt: We try to prioritize contacts that are related to active deliveries with immediate needs. It’s critical to us that we use technologies such as our ticketing system, which has a lot of plug-in functionality that makes it easier to integrate workstreams. We’re constantly evaluating new technologies to meet customer expectations, and we try not to use technology just for technology’s sake.

Using feedback (or lack thereof) wisely

Ubiquity: How do you use analytics feedback to help boost CSAT?

Matt: Data analytics always starts with analyzing CSAT ratings and tickets because we don’t want to make any assumptions there. And certainly we check to see if there are any surprises there as far as our users preferred channel or any certain activity that is leading to the satisfaction score submitted or the score averages we are seeing. Then we look at the traditional metrics around first call resolutions and response rates. We break all that down by channel to understand what the trends are.

Ubiquity: What about users who don’t give feedback?

Matt: Sometimes data that isn’t given is more insightful than that that is given. We also look at deflection rates and how we can become more efficient. We know that users would often rather be able to solve their problems themselves, so how can we improve the ability for our users to do that? You can’t always find that through CSAT, because those users aren’t engaging with us that far. So we have to keep that in mind as well.

Ubiquity: How are you managing growth?

Matt: Our business is growing, so we are constantly thinking about how we can innovate with our core technology and new technologies. And we add new products and features that we think will improve the customer experience as quickly as possible. How do we think about all those offerings where if the technology isn’t just right, that will lead to user dissatisfaction? It’s not easy, but that’s just part of the ongoing calculations that we do.

Ubiquity: Do you use positive reviews to learn what’s working?

Matt: We love positive reviews and we certainly analyze them so we can learn as much from the positives as we can from the constructive feedback. Quality is the most important metric for us, and we know that leads to great customer experiences and positive reviews. It starts with making sure we hire the right people, and then onboard and train properly. And then we spend substantial time assessing agents on how well they are meeting expectations, how well are they following their training, and how well are they responding to what users are saying.

Ubiquity: Any final thoughts?

Matt: We know that this business requires support. From Day One, we wanted to make sure we had a support team that was very knowledgeable and helpful, and that approach continues to be built into the culture of Roadie. We know we have to provide the best possible experiences to keep our users loyal to Roadie, and we aim to do that with every interaction.

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