How Guesty revamped support with Wix Answers and Zendesk QA

In 2019, the makers of the leading short-term rental property management platform Guesty decided to overhaul their customer care strategy. They set their sights on becoming customer-centric to the core and delivering nothing but exceptional customer service.

“Being customer-centric is critical to the success of our company,” says Doron Pryluk, Director of Customer Solutions at Guesty.

Intuitive and user-friendly customer service tools were the key that unlocked the vast potential in Guesty’s support team. And after adding new service providers to their arsenal of tools, coupled with their in-house efforts, Guesty’s customer reviews got a major boost. The company began using:

• Wix Answers, an all-in-one customer support platform that consolidates all support channels into a single view. With its clear UI, the team saves time on training, maintenance and gets a full picture of the customer’s journey.

• Zendesk QA (formerly Klaus), a support QA and conversation review tool that offers an effortless setup process, easy integration solutions, and handy browser extension.
  This combination of the Guesty team with software solutions boosted the productivity of the support team while also improving the quality of customer service.

Internal Quality Score as the lead KPI

Customer-centricity is not a mere buzzword at Guesty, it’s one of the company’s main missions. This is reflected in the systematic ways Guesty tracks agents’ performance.

Guesty’s CX team uses two types of KPIs:

• Ticket stats to understand how quickly a new support request receives a complete and correct solution

• Internal Quality Score to measure the quality of agents’ responses based on their internal quality standards.

Internal Quality Score (IQS) is a customer service metric that measures how well the support team’s conversations perform against a common QA scorecard. It pinpoints agents’ areas of improvement and helps them become better through consistent feedback.

Guesty set their own quality standards and customized their scorecard in reflection of their support values and objectives.

Guesty’s support team uses QA results as input for their weekly 1:1 sessions. Together with the manager, agents discuss their own performance and set goals for improvements. As a highly quality-oriented team, all agents are open to receiving feedback and eager to become better at what they do.

Tying review volume to performance

Guesty’s agents do five shifts per week and handle many tickets in every shift. On average, each agent receives feedback on 10% of their support interactions.

However, the specific number of reviews that each team member receives depends on their performance in the previous period. Guesty’s customer service team has tied review volume to agent performance to get the maximum benefit out of their QA program:

• The smallest proportion of conversations is reviewed for top performers

• Around 10% of tickets are QA’d for average performers

• The largest proportion of support interactions are reviewed for bottom performers

Performance-based review volumes enable the team to spend more resources on helping the agents who are struggling the most. This will, in turn, also have the biggest effect on the overall customer service quality.

Simultaneously, this systematic approach also makes sure that all agents – even the top performers – receive regular feedback that helps them keep up the good work.

Guesty conducts regular reviews on Zendesk QA to make sure they see constant improvements in agents’ performance.

Unbeatable browser extension and integrations

Guesty’s support team has been growing rapidly in the past few years. According to Doron, switching to Zendesk QA allowed them to invest the same amount of time on supporting QA with 50 people as they did three years ago with just 15 people.

Reviewing tickets without the right tools can be extremely time-consuming and inefficient. Here are the time-saving and productivity-boosting Zendesk QA features that helped Guesty scale their team without sacrificing support QA:

• Automatically pulls conversations in for review,

• Browser extension allows reviewers to go through support interactions without having to jump between different software solutions,

• Dashboard to visualize QA results and helps find agents’ areas of improvement.

Effortless and scalable QA processes have helped Guesty’s support team make conversation reviews an integral part of their everyday life.

“QA volume per agent might seem small but it can have a significant impact on the customer service quality,” says Doron Pryluk, Director of Customer Solutions at Guesty.

Guesty is an excellent example of a company nailing customer-centric business strategies. With customer reviews improving week after week, they’ve clearly cracked what it takes to make their users happy.

Becoming customer-centric doesn’t happen overnight or by chance. As with any other ambitious plan, it starts with setting the goals and building the right strategies. Working towards customer-centricity is not a one-time effort but continuous work that the right tools can help you achieve.