Cure.fit Builds an Empowered Support Team  with 95% Adherence to SLAs using Freshdesk

About Cure.fit

Founded in 2016, Cure.fit has become the ultimate disrupter in the Indian fitness industry. It has encouraged thousands of Indians to embark on their fitness journey by expanding the concept of ‘exercise’ beyond the conventional gyms. Starting initially with trainer-led fitness classes, Cure.fit has now expanded into all areas of wellness, including mental wellbeing, food, and telemedicine. 

From the early days of Cure.fit, the team recognized that superior customer experience had the power to be one of the biggest differentiators for the brand. Cure.fit implemented Freshdesk early on in its journey and has grown side-by-side with the solution. We spoke to Pritesh Jain, Head of Customer Experience at Cure.fit to understand how the team has used Freshdesk to deliver moments of wow to its customers. 

Building customer experience from the ground up

When Pritesh was first brought into the company, it was just a few months old. In typical startup fashion, the founding team wore multiple hats and managed customer interactions themselves, through emails and tags. As the company started to rapidly scale up, Pritesh was handed the responsibility of building the customer experience team from scratch to handle the growing volumes of queries. There were three core philosophies that would become vital to the formation of the new team:

• Customer support was the final frontier: The way Cure.fit saw it, its products had to be so good that customer support was not needed. “We are very particular about every aspect of our product interaction, operation interaction, our policies or communication. We measure contact per order and contact per transaction and we've been able to keep those metrics very low,” says Pritesh. This focus on building great experience by design has allowed Cure.fit to maintain a relatively small support team despite having a huge pan-India customer base.
• Speed was of the essence: When customers do reach out to the support team, their experience had to be as seamless as possible. As Pritesh explains, “To do this, you need to tick two boxes. First, it needs to be very easy for a customer to raise an issue. And second, consultants need to respond very fast, so the customer’s anxiety levels are low.”
• Support consultants had to be empowered: Cure.fit’s aim was to take away the burden of tracking and following up requests from the customers. For this to happen, first contact resolutions had to be high and consultants needed to be equipped with the right tools to do so. 

Shared inboxes were clearly an obstacle to achieving these three objectives. Cure.fit began to look out for a customer service solution that would help manage customer interactions in totality and provide a stellar experience to them. 

Implementing Freshdesk to simplify support

Along with hiring the first consutlants for the customer support team, Cure.fit began the search for the best customer service solution. Since many in the team had experience with Freshdesk, it soon became the frontrunner. What ultimately clinched the deal was that in terms of comprehensiveness of the solution, Freshdesk was unmatched. “Commercially also it looked reasonable and supported the architecture of the support tech we had planned. It went to production for us from the moment ‘go’!” adds Pritesh. 

Cure.fit now uses Freshdesk to manage tickets from customers, partners and employees. These queries come in through various channels and get converted as tickets on Freshdesk. 

Improving the employee experience and safety

One of the most unique features Cure.fit has built using Freshdesk is an employee SOS helpline. Gym trainers and delivery executives often have to work late into the night, which can create safety issues for them. If they ever need urgent help, employees can raise an alert and immediately get virtual or on-the-ground support from the safety team. The alert creates a ticket that has the employee’s contact information and location coordinates so help can be sent instantly. These SOS tickets are also critical to helping management learn what went wrong so it can be addressed and prevented from happening again.

Fine-tuning the ticket lifecycle for higher efficiency

For Cure.fit to maintain a lean support team, the incoming tickets needed to be prioritized and routed in a way that support consultants can easily resolve them within the SLAs. The support team is structured based on vertical (eg. fitness, wellness, and food), to minimize the amount of training required. Tickets are routed to the consultants based on the vertical and the urgency of the queries.

Fundamentally, there are three ways the team has segregated the tickets:

• App-based queries:  When an issue gets raised on the app, it is passed on to Freshdesk through API integrations. Because the user is logged into the app, consultants get basic details of the user and their history. Location also plays a role in defining the queuing and channeling of the ticket. For eg, if a user is reaching out from a Cult membership page, it’s most likely not urgent. But if someone reaches out from a doctor’s appointment screen, consultants need to respond on priority. 
• Email-based queries: With email, consultants don’t have a lot of context into the user history, but the actual content of the email is rich in information. Cure.fit has been using Freddy extensively to identify important keywords and use these to tag and filter emails that are urgent.  
• Social media and App store: Apart from the tickets that customers actively raise, they also mention queries or complaints on App Store reviews and social media platforms. The nature of the channel guides how the support team responds to these comments. For eg. Twitter is time-sensitive, but reviews on the App store are not as time-critical and require a concise response. 

Adding integrations for a multi-channel experience

The ease of adding integrations to Freshdesk has helped Cure.fit build a customized solution that is tailor-made for their requirements. There are three main integrations that have been built into the platform:

 

• CRM integration: Cure.fit has integrated their CRM solution with Freshdesk to provide consultants with more context when handling tickets. Every ticket has a button that takes the consultant to the customer’s profile, which has information about their history, past transactions and interactions. This enables consultants to make a more accurate call on a ticket.
• Integration with calls: Cure.fit doesn’t have an inbound voice call centre, so there isn’t a lot of emphasis on a dialer-based model. Instead, consultants make guided calls which are recorded. The integration of calls with Freshdesk means that they can easily connect to a call through Freshdesk and record the entire conversation.
• Jira and Odin integrations:  Only the customer support teams work out of Freshdesk so for tickets that require inputs from external teams, the portal is integrated with other project tools. Product or tech-related issues are transferred to the Engineering team through the Jira integration. For centre-related issues, the ticket is routed to Odin, the tool that Centre Managers use for their day-to-day operations. The seamless integrations with the different tools have helped teams stay focused on issues that are most relevant to them. 

Freshdesk’s open APIs have improved visibility of the ticket journey at all levels. The team is aware of what changes are happening to the ticket at each stage and measure the consultants’ way of working in a quantifiable way. “The amount of data we now have has helped us drive a lot of data-orientation in our teams and think of every aspect of customer support with data backing,” says Pritesh. 

The future of customer service at Cure.fit

Cure.fit’s business has largely been offline and it continues to aggressively expand its physical presence. But after COVID-19, their online classes conducted under the banner ‘Cult Live’ have been becoming hugely popular. “Our online offerings are evolving and we are still understanding how to best provide support there. Apart from keeping the team size low, we also want to identify the best channel to engage with our customers,” says Pritesh. Support through WhatsApp has been all the buzz lately and Cure.fit is contemplating adding it as a support platform, in addition to improving response times on social media, particularly Instagram.

Internally as well, Pritesh and his team are experimenting with automations and workflows to keep the support team smaller and smarter. “The human touch comes from the communication we do over call and mail. We are trying to integrate the consumer’s profile into a workflow so our consultants have enough context to personalize the experience even further.”