Meeting customers where they are is more than a figure of speech.

With a high-stakes service like moving a customers’ prized possessions, Mindful built customer trust while delivering operational excellence for 1-800-PACK-RAT.

• Headquartered

  North Carolina

• Industry

  Moving & Storage

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When your entire life is packed into a shipping container, customer service stakes have never been higher.

Of all the trends caused by the pandemic in 2020, long-distance moving provider 1-800-PACK-RAT got stuck between two: lockdown orders threw contact center operations and staffing into daily disarray…and over 15 million people decided to move.

In the midst of finding solutions as fast as possible, they attempted and ditched another callback solution after it caused unreliable hold times and poor customer experience. So, they turned to what they knew they could manage: voicemails. 

Of course, this operational step backward was just to bide their time while searching for something to alleviate their mounting abandonment and hold times.

Customers’ frustration grew. Staffing was an incredible undertaking, with some agents relegated to returning voicemails. And as the contact center world was experiencing a historic shift to remote work, ramping headcount was nearly impossible when people couldn’t be in the same room together.

All of these challenges added up to a chasm in customer experience and agent efficiency. After all, playing phone tag with customers when their lives and homes were in transit across the country isn’t exactly a loyalty-building best practice.

And that’s where Mindful’s best-in-class callback came in.

With Mindful, a small lift drives immediate impact.

With the best minds in the CX industry, our solutions engineers were able to get Mindful set up for 1-800-PACK-RAT in just a couple of weeks, with minimal changes to their tech stack and no additional training or skilling for agents.

The result? Hold times lowered 18% and abandonment rates dropped by nearly seven percent, giving much-needed relief to 1-800-PACK-RAT’s customers and the agents in their contact centers.

Due to staffing constraints and the needs of the business, 1-800-PACK-RAT needed to implement quickly and do so with minimal disruption. Mindful fit the bill there, too, bringing callback queues online with zero change in agent behavior without recoding or ripping out existing tech.

Elevated experience is better for both customers and agents.

The amazing thing about applying callback and all the transition pieces around it is its benefit to everyone—the customer, the agent, and, operationally, the brand.

Customers are treated like VIPs.

With an 87% reconnect rate and a nearly seven percent decrease in abandonment, it’s clear that customers prefer to be called back instead of waiting on hold.

Speaking of waiting on hold, applying Mindful to their queues eliminated 304 days of queue time in 2021 alone for 1-800-PACK-RAT customers. The experience is elevated even more as Mindful reduces over a minute of average seconds to answer for callbacks, giving customers a sense that the brand values their time.

The bottom line, however, centers around the customer experience.

“Let’s say our forklifts go down—that creates a big back pile of customers trying to reach our customer support team. Whenever that happens, we can’t service all those calls within normal hold times” explains Josef Almorado, Systems Engineer at 1-800-PACK-RAT. Josef is the boots-on-the-ground manager who assisted with Mindful’s integration into Five9, their chosen CCaaS platform.

“Mindful comes in, and we’re able to prioritize those calls, analyze when shift changes come up or we have an influx of available agents, then prioritize those customers using Mindful’s max queue depth, which is something we didn’t have with Five9.”

Texts keep efficiency high all around.

As a firm believer in omnichannel, we empower our clients to meet customers anywhere they are, offering transitions to anticipate their customers’ needs at any moment.

1-800-PACK-RAT saw those benefits and implemented Mindful’s SMS-based callback notifications right off the bat.

“If I’m working, and I get a notification that a meeting’s coming up, I know not to engage in anything that’ll keep me out of that,” reports Josef. “A customer gets that text message telling them to get ready for their callback, and they’re actually going to be ready for a callback with our agent.”

Texts also came in handy when customers missed their call. Whereas they would normally have to reenter the queue, thus exacerbating their frustrations with hold time, responding to a reconnect notification placed them back in queue, accounting for about three percent of their callback volume.

Offering a reconnect over text meets the customer exactly where they are, keeping them out of the IVR and focused on a great customer service interaction.

Agents gain a sigh of relief.

Trying to scale and skill agents for a peak season in the midst of the pandemic has been beyond difficult. Mindful stepped in to add relief and stability to a fast-paced contact center like 1-800-PACK-RAT’s, giving agents the breath they needed to solve problems as fast as they can.

And the results show it.

Let’s look at abandons. With Mindful’s customer-first callback strategy, 1-800-PACK-RAT removed 18,000 potential abandons. With other providers that only offer agent-first callback, this would have been 18,000 calls taking up an agent’s time connecting the call without the customer ever reaching the line.

“Our agents would be reserved, and when a customer’s voicemail answered, the agent would pick up and introduce themselves, but then it’s a customer voicemail and would ruin their flow,” says Josef. “Mindful was able to actually connect the agent to the live customer, which helps us both out.”

Most callback solutions are agent-first—the agent picks up the phone and the customer is dialed. But if the customer doesn’t answer, that’s a full 30 seconds per call lost in agent time.

Mindful’s customer-first callback saved 1-800-PACK-RAT nearly $12,000 a year on agent time that would have been wasted with agent-first dialing, not to mention the thousands saved by eliminating repeat calls.

“Mindful allows us to cut our agent count back,” reports Thomas Morris, Supervisor of Call Center Operations at 1-800-PACK-RAT. “Instead of one agent dedicated to callbacks or to voicemails, we’re able to use Mindful in place of one or two employees.”

Digital and voice bridge together to increase revenue and aim at true omnichannel.

“Since adding Mindful, our brand has grown, and this year we were able to manage agent efficiency more effectively while capturing that customer experience.” Tiffany Glass, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, has seen the business-line effects of a great customer experience. “Callback has definitely helped day to day in leveling off peaks and call spikes. Without Mindful, I can only imagine how many agents we’d have to hire.”

Looking forward to their customer experience maturity, Tiffany drew a target around omnichannel after polling customers and hearing of the need.

“It’s all about giving the customer the channel and the timing in which the customer wants to capture their interest with the brand. Mindful is one tool to do that—it’s really all about the customer experience.”

Since then, they’ve begun advancing into these digital transitions by leveraging Mindful on their Quote page.

When a potential customer wants a quote, the team puts the customer in control of the experience by allowing them to choose how they want to interact. This not only builds loyalty and trust with the customer, but can also help the team gauge interest.

After a prospect fills out their quote, they’re taken to a Confirmation page. Here the customer can choose to wait for their emailed quote or receive their quote right away. And since a high value interaction is the perfect time to transition to a call, here’s where Mindful captures the demand and bridges the gap.

The customer enters their phone number and is placed in queue for a salesperson to reach them. And the experience is enhanced even more when they’re confirmed via text with a heads-up on how they’ll be contacted.

“It’s all about giving the customer the channel and the timing in which the customer wants to capture their interest with the brand,” Tiffany explains. “Mindful is one tool to do that—it’s really all about the customer experience.”

We couldn’t agree more.