How Trengo helped Ferryscanner handle a 700% increase of customer queries with ease

"Trengo offers us much more than I had ever imagined possible."

Those are the words of Alvertos Iskinatzis, customer success supervisor at Ferryscanner, a Greece-based search and booking engine that helps people find affordable ferry tickets to exciting destinations all over the world.

The summer months for Alvertos were always among the most hectic months of his job. Every year he and his team saw a big increase in conversations and scrambled to manage these successfully. But this year was different. During high season, Ferryscanner saw a 700% increase in customer inquiries across five different communication channels and was able to handle these with ease because of Trengo.

Since implementing Trengo at the beginning of 2021, Ferryscanner has been able to better manage all its communication channels, automate time-consuming parts of their workflow, and efficiently collaborate on answering customer questions. "Overall, the use of Trengo has made for a much more structured and systematic high season," says Alvertos.

Challenge

"As customer success supervisor, it's my job to make sure the team is fully equipped and trained to provide our customers with the best experience possible," says Alvertos. "That's why I was also responsible for setting up Trengo earlier this year."

Before engaging with the team at Trengo, Ferryscanner used a different platform to manage their customer contact. But according to Alvertos, it had some major flaws. Most importantly, integrating the social media channels was both very difficult and very expensive.

"Last year, without Trengo, we had to have our Facebook opened next to our customer contact platform to see if we had missed any comments or direct messages."

And that made for a time-consuming workflow. "Last year, without Trengo, we had to have our Facebook opened next to our customer contact platform to see if we had missed any comments or direct messages. This took up a lot of my time," says Alvertos. "The main reason we had to make the switch was that we wanted to offer our customer more channels to contact us. And for us to be able to better manage those channels."

Solution

Currently, Ferryscanner manages conversations via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, email, live chat, and Google's Business Messages in Trengo. "We don't have a call center, so you can only reach us via these channels," says Alvertos. "This can be difficult for our more traditional customers. Although this year, there have been significantly fewer complaints about the lack of phone support. We believe that's because we simply offer more and better options now."

When customers contact Ferryscanner, they are first asked a couple of questions by a Flowbot. Alvertos explains, "The bot saves the team loads of time. It collects basic information about the customer before they get in contact with one of our human agents. Not having to ask for a booking code from every single customer makes our job much easier."

Sometimes, the customer success agents need each other's help to solve an issue. But instead of having to call or walk over to each other's desks, they use Trengo's internal comments. By simply tagging their colleague within a message thread, it's easier to have effective internal discussions with the right context.

Results

Alvertos had no prior experience in setting up a platform like Trengo. "But with some help of Trengo's customer success team, I set everything up fast. It was very easy to do, especially with all the detailed video tutorials."

Regardless of the issue, the Ferryscanner team always aims to close customer inquiries within 24 hours. Even though this summer has been the busiest ever, the team would still always manage to close inquiries way before the full day is up. Trengo's automation features such as the Flowbot and the quick replies already made this possible.

With expectations of an even busier summer in 2022, Alvertos is now planning to improve Ferryscanner's Flowbot. "By adding labels to all our conversations, we were able to categorize everything by topic. We used labels such as 'Cancellation' or 'Covid-19'," says Alvertos. "Our most-used label was added to at least 35,000 conversations. My belief is that we can answer a lot of these frequently asked questions with our bot in the future. This gives our human agents time to manage more complicated issues."

How did Ferryscanner make it happen?

These are the things Ferryscanner did to conquer the busy summer period with Trengo.

1. Connected their communication channels to Trengo
With Trengo, Ferryscanner's customer success team needs just one platform to manage all email, live chat, WhatsApp, Google's Business Messages, and Facebook. In the near future, they're also planning on activating Instagram Messaging.

2. Set up a Flowbot
Ferryscanner set up a Flowbot to collect some basic information at the beginning of every conversation. In Trengo, you can easily create your own bot without any knowledge of coding. Learn how you can do this too.

3. Labeled conversations
By labeling conversations, Ferryscanner is able to detect the most frequently asked questions during the summer months. This helps them to improve their Flowbot, so that answering these questions can be automated in the future.