7-Eleven Philippines resolves 98% tickets within SLAs using Freshdesk

About 7-Eleven

7-Eleven is a global convenience store brand and is one of the most recognizable names in retail. The Philippines chapter of 7-Eleven began back in 1982 when Philippines Seven Corp (PSC) acquired the license to open and run 7-Eleven stores all across the country. For close to four decades now, 7-Eleven Philippines has been the pioneer of 24-hour convenience stores in the country. Today, there are over 3000 7-Eleven stores in the Philippines.

Ever since its inception, the company has been fuelled by a desire to bring convenience like never before to its customers. This philosophy extends to its customer support. We spoke to Allian Marie Sheila Dela Cruz, business process innovations consultant and Aeruh John Dimalanta, customer care specialist, to understand how 7-Eleven Philippines transformed customer service with Freshworks.

Overcoming blindspots in customer support performance

Before Freshdesk, customer support at 7-Eleven was outsourced to an external vendor partner. The challenge that arose with this was that the team had limited visibility into customer query patterns and performance metrics. “In 2019, we were using our vendor's platform and there was a lack of transparency into their analytics. We could not validate their reports,” says Dela Cruz. 7-Eleven was also using the vendor’s telephony solution and faced similar challenges with the reports. “We had no visibility into the volume of calls, number of abandoned calls, etc.,” she continues. 

To gain more control and visibility into customer support, the team decided to bring the entire function in-house. “We began exploring helpdesk solutions that would enable us to build a strong in-house support team,” says Dimalanta. The two frontrunners were Freshdesk and Zendesk, but Freshdesk emerged as the winner because of its cost-effectiveness. Freshdesk was also preferred because of the Freshdesk Contact Centre integration that would help move call support in-house as well. 

Segmenting customer queries for targeted support

With the in-house team handling all support queries for 7-Eleven Philippines, management has complete visibility into the types of queries coming in. Largely, a bulk of customer queries fall under the following top concerns: 

• Employment opportunities: After COVID-19, due to a spike in unemployment, 7-Eleven has seen a sharp increase in the number of queries related to job opportunities, both for store staff and managers. 

• Franchise opportunities: 7-Eleven has been consistently rated as a top-5 franchisor so queries about opening up a franchise are one of the most common types of questions the support team handles. This has also increased after COVID-19 as many people want to lease their properties to earn extra income. 

• Loyalty and rewards: 7-Eleven offers a loyalty and rewards program through their CLIQQ app, which allows customers to redeem points in exchange for gifts and offers. Customers often enquire about their account details and crediting of bonus points. 

• Payments and partner-related: The company has over 400 partner merchants affiliated with in-store CLiQQ kiosks. Through these kiosks, customers can make e-wallet payments, purchase call credits and make utility payments. If the customers have payment validation questions, these are directed to the 7-Eleven support team. Customers can also purchase 7-Eleven merchandise through delivery partners like Shopee and foodpanda. The internal support team handles all questions related to order confirmation and tracking for orders made through these partners. 

• Product and store-related: The final category of queries are related to the actual stores and products, such as product availability, expiration dates, etc. The team also receives queries raised on the CLiQQ app, which is the e-commerce app developed by 7-Eleven. 

These queries are handled by two different groups within the customer support team: the general customer care group which handles general store and payment queries and the CLiQQ group that handles queries related to the Loyalty program and delivery partners. Queries from every channel are routed through Freshdesk, making it a central control center for the whole team.

Reducing handling time through scenario automation

One of the most impactful features of Freshdesk for 7-Eleven has been scenario automations. The company gets a huge amount of queries through social media channels like Facebook. Typically, each comment or post that the company is tagged in gets converted into a ticket on Freshdesk. However, not all of these comments are issues that agents need to respond to. In many cases, they’re just customers engaging with the post through likes or emojis. To avoid such responses from getting converted into tickets, 7-Eleven has implemented scenario automations. “We are able to answer tickets in just a few hours, which is very quick compared to how we were performing without Freshdesk,” says Dela Cruz. 

Scenario automations have proved particularly useful during promotions. July is the official 7-Eleven month and a majority of the company’s promotional activities happen during this time. “When people respond to our promotions or contests online, those are automatically filtered out on Freshdesk. Our agents don’t have to click on every query and add the properties to the ticket. This saves us a huge amount of time,” she says.

Improving usability for agents and managers

As Dimalanta, puts it, “7-Eleven is called a convenience store for a reason. We were established with the vision of redefining what convenience for a customer actually means.” With Freshworks, 7-Eleven has been able to extend this same level of convenience to its internal staff as well. 

Agents who use Freshdesk and Freshcaller on a daily basis find the tools very user-friendly and easy to navigate. “Our agents love the Canned Responses feature,” says Dimalanta. “All they have to do is click the ‘plus’ sign and the response goes into the answer box. All the icons on the dashboard are also very self-explanatory, which makes it easy to train and onboard new agents onto the solution.”

On the management side, Team Leads and Managers love the detailed Reporting and Analytics feature. With Freshworks, the team has complete visibility into support metrics, something that was lacking when they were outsourcing customer support. “We closely monitor first-response time and ticket resolution time, which is very transparent to check on Freshdesk. We are on top of our productivity because of the Analytics and Reporting feature that Freshdesk offers,” says Dimalanta. Speaking about the reports on Freshcaller, Dela Cruz says, “We’re able to see the arrival patterns of the calls that are coming in through Freshcaller and the tickets that are coming in through Freshdesk and distinguish the arrival patterns between those two. We can also see how quickly our agents are able to respond to calls and the number of dropped or abandoned calls.”

Taking convenience a step further

Inspired by the huge improvements in their support capabilities that 7-Eleven has seen, the team is planning to expand their usage of Freshdesk and Freshcaller. “We are planning on adding more licenses on Freshdesk and Freshcaller because we really appreciate the features of the tools. This is based on the improved metrics that we are seeing and how happy we are with our performance,” says Dela Cruz. 

Chatbot support might also be a possibility in the near future. Dela Cruz and her team expect that with chatbots, a greater number of queries will get resolved faster without agents having to actively intervene. This will undoubtedly strengthen the promise of convenience that 7-Eleven is now synonymous with.