How OdontoCompany scaled support for 1,700 franchisees and 25 million patients

For Brazil’s OdontoCompany, which operates 1,700 dental clinics serving 25 million patients, one major challenge is keeping all those clinic owners and patients happy—smiling, you might say.

Every clinic relies on efficient IT systems for appointment scheduling and storing and retrieving dental records. Odonto provides franchisees with TekCare, its in-house platform to handle clinic operations. Franchisees were happy with TekCare, but customer support for the platform was failing.

The 10 agents on the franchisee support team first used a common messaging platform, then switched to a customer service app, to juggle 8,000+ monthly requests. But the team had no system to document, prioritize, or automate the queries. Response times extended to 24 hours. 

After too many outages with the app, CIO Alexandre Ricoy sought a more reliable, heavy-duty solution and turned to Freshworks. With the help of implementation partner Bravo Solutions, Odonto rolled out Freshdesk, which slashed response time for franchisees by 97% and reduced the number of redundant queries on the same topic, allowing the support team to focus on bigger issues. Ricoy then turned to Bravo to add Freshservice for better IT support for franchisees.

By switching to a modern helpdesk solution to improve service, Odonto achieved significant gains in internal efficiency while laying the foundation for sustainable growth—essential for a company that was adding 400 new franchises per year. And with the necessary support and specialized consultancy from Bravo, Odonto's agents were better able to explore the various capabilities of each solution.

The company

OdontoCompany in Brazil is one of the largest dental clinic networks in the world. Its 1,700 franchise locations in 1,000 cities see 25 million patients every year. OdontoCompany provides franchisees with TekCare, its proprietary software that handles appointments, patient registration, payments, and secure documents. 

The challenge

When you’re a fast-growing business like Odonto, poorly managed support tickets can balloon out of control quickly. The company’s initial solutions for ticket handling weren't robust enough for the increasing ticket volume. Odonto needed a solution to categorize and route tickets and to provide actionable data on franchisee requests and agent performance. Ricoy also sought other features, such as a data management system that could pinpoint where improvements could be made in servicing customers and provide performance evaluations of the agents. Having previously used Freshservice at Havas Brazil and during his tenure with the Poliedro education system in Brazil, Ricoy saw Freshservice as the right product for Odonto's needs. 

Lastly, to reduce the number of calls, Odonto was looking for a self-service solution in a web portal with a helpful chatbot. Enter Freshdesk, built on Neo Platform and powered by AWS.

The solution

Odonto first deployed Freshdesk to help manage ticket volume, match resources to the support needed, gain insights on ticket severity, and give feedback to agents. 

In short order, the company also realized the limitations of its IT operations and the necessity of an improved internal system for managing IT requests from the company’s 5,000 employees as well as better managing IT for all 1,700 of its franchisees. With so many diverse computing assets and software spread out across the country, Odonto recognized the need for a reliable cloud-based solution that would allow them to meet both internal and external SLAs and be able to scale as the company continued to grow. Freshservice, built on a framework of IT best practices (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library), has made tasks like change management predictable, consistent, and minimally disruptive.

With Freshdesk, franchisees can now open service requests via the web, email, or WhatsApp. Chatbots and the web portal draw on the same knowledge base, helping to deflect queries and resolve issues before reaching an agent. Post-incident surveys give agents quick feedback and provide Ricoy with data on how his agents are performing. When IT tickets come in from franchisees via Freshdesk, they are quickly routed to Freshservice for the internal IT team to resolve.

Impact

Self-service, automated routing, and data insights have helped Odonto improve support and keep franchisees focused on their businesses. Pairing Freshdesk and Freshservice improved the IT approvals workflow, increased agent efficiency, and boosted customer satisfaction.

Freshdesk also helps monitor the status of Odonto’s customer service SLA and prioritizes critical tickets. As a result, first response times dropped from three hours to five minutes. And agents, once struggling to get through thousands of tickets, now handle 60% more tickets every day.

Freshservice’s improved change management was equally a boon for franchisees, who no longer experienced downtime during TekCare upgrades. 

“I can monitor the customer service SLA on a control panel. It’s one of the most important features,” says Ricoy. “Now we have SLA definitions and tickets defined by type, one of which is critical tickets that have to be closed within two hours; this is displayed on the panel, and we have alarms.”