Fantastic Services increases chat ROI
by 100% with Freshchat

About Fantastic Services

Fantastic Services is a one-stop-shop for property maintenance services, with presence in the UK, US, and Australia. The company takes pride in helping over 60,000+ people every month with cleaning, gardening, plumbing, and pest control. Founders Rune Sovndahl and Anton Skarlatov started Fantastic Services to aid busy, working folk with reliable property maintenance at the click of a button.

The company works in collaboration with more than 500 qualified franchisees and 2,000 professionals across three continents to take property maintenance services door-to-door. While the franchise partners specialize in maintenance, the inhouse team focuses on sales, marketing, and customer service. 

Today, the in-house team at Fantastic Services interacts with its customers predominantly through chat, phone, and email channels. With the introduction of Freshchat as their chat platform, Fantastic Services was able to double their chat-generated revenue. 

Freshchat - a tool for both sales and support

Prior to Freshchat, Fantastic Services used a custom-built live chat platform. However, the sales and customer service teams faced two major challenges with it:

Limited capabilities and features: The platform performed only basic tasks. The agents had to manually pick up tickets which took time away from interacting with customers. Additionally, agents spent more time waiting for replies from idle customers, which reduced agent concurrency. 

Required technical expertise: Even with a full in-house development team, Fantastic Services found it hard to maintain its chat platform. Maintenance and technical updates slowed down support.  They needed an outsider to lend a hand with the chat channel. 

Freshchat was the perfect solution for the teams at Fantastic Services. The myriad of features offered by Freshchat along with ease-of-use enabled the sales and customer service teams to scale their chat channel. Fantastic Services now uses Freshchat not just for customer service but for revenue generation as well.

Improving agent productivity

Before implementing Freshchat, as the agents were manually picking up tickets they weren’t spending time with customers. Two Freshchat features helped them with this - IntelliAssign and ‘Read Receipts’  

IntelliAssign: The chats are routed to either the sales team or the support team based on the requirements and location of the customer, which could be either the UK or Australia. IntelliAssign has saved the team valuable minutes that they are now able to dedicate to solving customer queries.

Read receipts: The team found value in the ‘read receipts’ feature which told the agents whether the customer had seen their message. This helped prioritize active vs passive conversations and save time.

Increased conversion through visibility

In her role as the Sales Lead, Denitsa was able to create campaigns on Freshchat that bring in new customers through chat. She set up proactive trigger messages that were informative and witty to capture the attention of new website visitors. 

Denitsa says, “The campaigns we run on chat are more visible and easier to communicate to customers.” With consistent messaging to remind customers that they can reach out to teams through chat, Fantastic Services was able to increase their conversion rate by 10% with Freshchat. 

Stepping up customer service

To maintain high standards of customer service, the business sees chat as an important service. Unlike phone and email, the agents are able to solve for multiple customers simultaneously. The team maintains a concurrency of 4 to 5 chats per agent. This was made easy with the help of the auto-resolve feature which closes conversations that are idle for over 15 minutes. The agents sustain a first response rate of 1 minute and 30 seconds with the help of these features and a CSAT score of 4.8 out of 5.

Reaching new customers bases in a pandemic

Much like businesses across the world, Fantastic Services was not immune to the consequences of the pandemic. At a time when businesses witnessed a downturn in revenue, Fantastic Services pivoted it’s offering to provide time-sensitive services such as antiviral sanitization and doubled on already existing ones like storage, and relocation services. 

This opened up a new customer base for the company - students and expatriates. Many students needed to swiftly vacate their university housing. Fantastic Services saw an uptick in chat queries from outside the UK from students who were predominantly looking to have their belongings packed, stored, or shipped to them. For students who lived abroad, live chat was a convenient way to reach agents at Fantastic Services. The phone channel often levied international calling rates and email was just too slow. Live chat was a free service that was faster than email to help students who needed rapid responses. 

Over the lockdowns months, the team was able to witness the power of the chat channel over their phone and email channels. 

Winning with Freshchat 

Fantastic Services found tremendous value in using Freshchat to power their chat channel. It has given them the ability to scale and focus on growth even during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company is now looking to further automate customer queries with the help of bots. With the help of Freshchat, one can only say that among the three channels used by the company, chat has done a ‘clean sweep’.