Contact Center Trends

Tuft & Needle Customer Service Achieves 96% Service Level with Talkdesk

By Gavin Gustafson

July 19, 2018

0 min read

Mattress shopping was not easy in the pre-digital economy. Consumers had to go to the mattress store to join dozens of other consumers taking turns laying on a handful of different mattresses to find, in that moment, the mattress they would sleep on for the next ten years. Should they pick the wrong one, they’d have to deal with the headaches (and backaches) of trying to figure out the warranty and the battle of getting the store manager to let them return it.

This is the experience JT Marino and Daehee Park, co-founders of Tuft & Needle, separately had while mattress shopping. So, they started Tuft & Needle with a mission to provide high quality mattresses at an affordable price while giving customers an amazing experience they rarely receive at traditional stores.

In 2014, the Tuft & Needle support team consisted only of a handful of agents. Because the team was so small, agents were using a free phone service paired with their cell phones to make and receive calls. A little over a year later, the company saw incredible growth and the support team grew by 20x. Agents were having a difficult time knowing who was calling in and it was unclear to management as to when their busiest call times were, making staffing decisions difficult.

Having agents rely on a basic solution also made it difficult for them to keep all their customer data organized in one place. Conversations coming in through email and chat had to be manually paired with existing interactions coming in over the phone, making day-to-day support more complicated than necessary.

Tuft & Needle prides itself on being a “digitally-native” company. Their operations have and continue to be facilitated primarily online, and their number one goal is to provide great experiences to the modern customer. With this, they knew they needed a new contact center solution that supported this vision of providing the next generation of support and could scale with their fast-growing team.

After Tuft & Needle’s former Chief Operating Officer, Aaron Bata, used Talkdesk at his previous company, Bonobos, he knew the enterprise contact center platform would be the perfect solution to solve Tuft & Needle’s customer experience challenges. In only a matter of hours, Talkdesk was set up and the team was fully trained on the solution.

Since taking over as Head of Customer Experience in 2015, Aaron has viewed the Talkdesk Enterprise Contact Center Platform as a critical technology asset in his support stack.

"Our number one goal is to make sure every customer is receiving an amazing experience"

Aaron Bata, COO at Tuft & Needle

Using Talkdesk to Spring a Rigid Industry Forward

Talkdesk’s advanced reporting and analytics have given Aaron a clear view into team performance and the quality of customer experience they’re delivering. “Our number one goal is to make sure every customer is receiving an amazing experience,” said Aaron. This starts with looking at three qualitative KPIs: teamwork, problem-solving and customer communication or empathy. Once these are satisfied, Aaron focuses on the granular metrics that roll up into these three pillars. These metrics include the ratio of after call work to total number of calls, number of calls per hour, average speed to answer and number of calls scheduled per hour. “We’re able to measure all of this through Talkdesk, which makes it incredibly easy to view and action on this data,” said Aaron. The scope and depth of Talkdesk’s reporting has stood out to Aaron: “It lets us know how and where we can improve, both on a team and individual basis,” he said.

Would you like to learn more about how Tuft & Needle is leveraging the power of Talkdesk’s Enterprise Contact Center Platform to ensure every customer receives an amazing customer experience? How they raised service levels and continually maintain their high standards?