Meet Marley Spoon
Marley Spoon is one of the world’s leading meal kit delivery services, bringing delightful, market-fresh, and easy cooking back to the people. Serving over 5 million households across 8 countries worldwide, its customer support team has played a critical role in their industry success.
Their team has been using Kaizo since 2018. Throughout its multinational growth, Kaizo has helped improve the efficiency, productivity, and quality of their management and team processes.
In this case study, you’ll find out how Marley Spoon has utilized Kaizo’s features to streamline their management processes and maintain high performance levels during hyper-growth.
Challenge
Lack of visibility during hyper-growth
Melanie Lange, Head of Customer Communications Operations Excellence, joined Marley Spoon in 2015. She has played an integral part in centralizing customer service in Berlin (now in Lisbon) whilst managing operations of remote and WFH sub-teams in Europe, Australia, and the U.S. Since then, Marley Spoon’s customer service team has grown from a team of 15 to 150 support experts worldwide.
Before Kaizo, getting insights into their team’s performance was a time-consuming and manual process made up of dozens of spreadsheets.
The lack of real-time data and visibility over multiple teams posed a problem for Melanie. It meant she was spending far too much valuable time on data entry and analysis that could have been spent on managing and improving her teams.
During this period of hypergrowth, Melanie was tasked with two main objectives:
- Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of management processes
- Centralizing and scaling their quality assurance (QA) program
Solution
Automated real-time insights & QA
Marley Spoon immediately saw how Kaizo could help with their growing pains. In combination with hyper-growth, shifting towards a remote workplace due to COVID, meant that their team needed cohesiveness and visibility across the board. As a result, they started and have continued using the Agent and Team Scorecards to automate their performance analysis process.
With 50+ metrics that can be filtered per team, channel, or timezone, they give Melanie real-time insights at a glance into how each of her teams is performing on a personal and team level.
“It was two birds with one stone. Our two main issues of lagging and inaccurate data were solved with the weighted performance scorecards’ instant insights”
Melanie Lange, Head of Customer Communications Operations Excellence
Melanie now saves hours per week previously spent on spreadsheet data entry. This time can now be spent on analyzing the data and pinpointing areas for improvement (aka coachable moments). In this time of hypergrowth, it has helped keep their management process lean.
Capacity planning
When it comes to managing a fast scaling team, one of the biggest challenges is capacity planning. Marley Spoon uses the Team Scorecard to ensure they are prepared with staff and resources during growth.
Team Scorecard allows Melanie to instantly click between real-time and historical data. This makes it easier than ever to identify her team’s average comments solved per hour and total ticket inbound side by side. The Scorecard automatically aggregates these numbers and provides trend reports to easily calculate her staffing needs.
The instant accessibility of Team Scorecard’s insights means that Melanie no longer has to calculate her capacity needs manually – meaning no more human error and no more spreadsheets.
Coaching & feedback
Another major challenge for Marley Spoon was to ensure a consistent level of service quality amidst their fast-growing, multi-national teams. Kaizo has helped streamline this process from pinpointing problem areas to targeted retraining.
As a major influence in the creation of Kaizo’s tool, Marley Spoon have been using it to ensure service quality since 2018. To start with, they were using QA to rate a few tickets a week. After realizing its worth, they have now built a dedicated, central QA team. The team uses Kaizo as their only tool to review 5,000 + conversations monthly across their in-house, remote, and WFH teams.
“We’ve scaled our QA process from rating 3-5 tickets each week per agent to reviewing more than 5,000 conversations every month”
Melanie Lange, Head of Customer Communications Operations Excellence
Kaizo’s tool has provided Marley Spoon with a holistic view of their team’s performance. It has gifted them with extra time, saved by ditching spreadsheets and greater visibility of productivity and quality metrics side by side. As a result, Marley Spoon are more accurately and efficiently able to coach their teams.
With the ability to customize quality criteria all integrated into a weighted performance scorecard, it made it easy to create one uniform level of Marley Spoon service quality worldwide.
“The granularity and accuracy of the QA tool allows us to know exactly which niche topics to tackle each week in performance improvement plans”
Melanie Lange, Head of Customer Communications Operations Excellence
The QA team reviews these criteria weekly and uses them as the basis for their coaching and feedback. They use the tool to have weekly sessions and monthly quality quizzes to facilitate their performance improvement plans.
Proactive coaching, performance management, and effective goal setting are all critical components to high performance teams and employee satisfaction.
“We partner with companies like Kaizo to help agents stay engaged and invested in their career development, through their innovative service that includes skill-building challenges, positive reinforcement on progress, and targeted training programs.”
Melanie Lange, Head of Customer Communications Operations Excellence
Our solution has helped customers like Marley Spoon to make the most of their performance coaching and skill-building solution, increasing their Tickets Solved by almost 60% YOY while maintaining their service quality, and saving around 90 hours per week to effectively scale up their team.
Kaizo has helped Marley Spoon scale a centralized quality assurance team and provide consistent service across all teams. On a day to day basis, it saves them time on data entry and analysis, pinpointing problems, and has streamlined their coaching process.
Results
Kaizo has been helping Marley Spoon manage and scale their team since 2018. This has culminated in some outstanding results:
- Expanding into 4 new countries and growing their customer support team by 10x.
- Centralizing in Lisbon – managing teams in 3 different time zones with Kaizo.
- Ditching spreadsheets and automating their performance analysis process.
- Building an entire centralized QA team that now rates over 5,000 solved tickets p/month.
What’s next?
The more Marley Spoon continues to grow, the leaner their management processes are becoming. Kaizo is committed to continuing this exciting journey with Marley Spoon and to keeping pushing one another forwards.
