Taskrabbit optimizes support and workforce management with intuitive AI solutions

Furniture assembly, home repairs, cleaning, and more. When daily to-do lists get too daunting, it’s time to book a Tasker on Taskrabbit. The trusted global service network connects people who need help doing everyday household tasks with skilled, reliable Taskers from their local communities.

Taskrabbit was founded in 2008 and acquired by the Ingka Group (IKEA) in 2017. The company operates in thousands of cities across Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and its services are available in more than 200 IKEA stores worldwide.

Going all in on agent specialization

The company’s 320 support agents have a mammoth task of their own, providing 24/7 service to North America and Europe in nine languages, including English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and German. It takes a lot of coordination to keep millions of global customers satisfied and empower an ever-evolving workforce of movers and plumbers, drivers and doers (aka Taskers).

To create effective and efficient CX experiences, Taskrabbit divided its support organization into three teams that each focus on different user groups: Taskers on the B2B side, Clients on the B2C side, and Registrants (new Taskers onboarding). That specialization is important, because each user group has their own needs, vocabulary, and preferred channels, with Taskers more likely to use chat and clients often choosing phone support.

“Each user group also has different types of contacts and target metrics,” says Nicole Edwards, workforce management analyst at Taskrabbit. “Separating agents and having them specialize in a particular client base helps us generate more accurate performance metrics and allows them to be successful in achieving their KPI goals.”

Accurate forecasting with WFM

Getting the right tools in place has played a crucial part in the company’s evolution. Since 2011, Taskrabbit has been using Zendesk for external CX and internal support on several teams, including IT.

Around 42 percent of total support volume comes in via Zendesk chat, while email and web forms each account for 17 percent, and voice makes up 10 percent. Taskrabbit also handles queries on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and offers two support apps through the Zendesk API–one for Taskers and one for Clients.

Taskrabbit faced challenges in tracking agent activity, adherence, and scheduling processes across multiple systems. To solve these gaps, they opted for a WFM tool that could help them better allocate their agents, improve visibility, and enhance schedule adherence. By adopting a WFM tool that could automatically pull their activity into Zendesk, they eliminated manual tagging and reduced errors from constantly switching between systems.

This solution boosted schedule adherence to 90% with real-time monitoring and quick adjustments. Accurate data on ticket volumes and staffing trends improved forecasting accuracy by 90%, achieving less than 5% variance.

Flexible support in a remote-first culture

An improved tech stack enables Taskrabbit to meet the shifting needs of customers and agents in a remote-first work environment, and to allocate resources and support channels accordingly.

“With so many people working from home, they now have the freedom and flexibility to contact support whenever they want, through chat or a quick phone call,” says Kevin Rury, senior workforce management analyst. “We’re trying to understand these new patterns and new ways customers are interacting with us, so we can adjust our staffing and scheduling agents appropriately. Because we support multiple time zones and nine distinct languages, we have to make sure that those are covered by the right agents.”

Becoming a remote-first company with everyone working from home has also helped Taskrabbit improve the employee experience and become more agile as an organization. Edwards shares, “Creating a flexible work environment enabled the company to expand operating hours to better fit the needs of clients and Taskers, so we’re seeing the best of both worlds.”

On the fast track to greater CX success

Due to recent expansion and growth into more countries, Taskrabbit’s ticket volume has jumped 60 percent and help center views have increased 40 percent year over year. The support team currently handles 158,000 tickets per month, demonstrating a real need for more self-service to drive ticket deflection.

In response, Taskrabbit has added five key goals to its CX roadmap: self-service, customer segmentation, automation, omnichannel support, and reporting. To help reach these goals, they decided to launch a Zendesk AI agent.

Connecting customers across continents with automation

In addition to serving a two-sided marketplace of both self-employed workers and the clients who hire them, Taskrabbit’s AI agent would also need to be able to route queries to the right countries by picking up on location and regional dialects. For example, it would need to be able to recognize French Canadian or US Spanish. Zendesk’s AI agent was the only solution on the market that could do that.

Taskrabbit went live with an AI agent and saw near-instant ROI. 100% of chats start with their AI agent, and they’ve reached a 28% deflection rate — far exceeding their initial KPIs. What’s more, Taskrabbit’s agents have reported increased job satisfaction, as more monotonous queries have been taken over by AI.

The timing of the launch was ideal, with Taskrabbit’s North American team moving from their slow winter period into a summer peak. “We’re seeing clear backlogs, which has never happened before,” reports Edwards. “This is a new and exciting world for Taskrabbit, as we’re going into our busy season prepared.”

Finding the right balance of self-service and staffing has freed up the team to work more proactively. Edwards says, “I can now start doing what workforce management professionals are supposed to do–planning, looking to the future, and strategically positioning the business so we can continue to grow and meet our goals.”