Taskrabbit sees quick time to value with seamless WFM integration

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 six languages: 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.”

Quick and seamless integration for accurate forecasting

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.

The global organization needed an equally robust workforce management tool to ensure that they were staffing the right agents, at the right times, in the right languages. Their previous solution was often inaccurate, unreliable, or too slow when it came to data, forecasting, and product support, so agents resorted to manual updates and tracking in Excel.

All that changed when the team saw a demo for Assembled, touting its integration capabilities. “The difference was night and day with Assembled–the features, the functionality, and the fact that it consistently works the way it should,” recalls Edwards. “And it integrated so seamlessly with Zendesk out of the box.”

Taskrabbit jumped on the opportunity and enjoyed a speedy implementation and data migration. “It’s been a miracle story with the WFM tool,” adds Edwards. “The biggest configuration and standup processes can take months. To have Assembled come in and only two weeks later say, you’re live, you’re onboard, was mind-blowing.”

Real-time management starts with reliable data

One of Taskrabbit’s biggest challenges was getting visibility on each agent’s real-time activity, exporting historical activity, and accounting for things like chat concurrency. Before moving to Assembled, the team had to navigate three or four systems to get a realistic picture of schedule adherence.

Edwards explains, “Assembled removed the need for agents to manually tag their activity in a separate tool because it pulls their activity into Zendesk automatically. That eliminates the human error and the onus on the agent of switching between systems.” A real-time dashboard makes it easy to monitor agent status and queues and make schedule changes in seconds, so Taskrabbit’s schedule adherence rocketed to 90 percent.

With data on ticket volume and staffing trends readily available, the team can forecast more accurately, and improve their planning, staffing, and scheduling. Since integrating Assembled one year ago, Taskrabbit is seeing less than 5 percent variance in forecasting, which marks a 90 percent improvement over the previous WFM tool and is right on track with their goal.

“It is a night and day change from where we were. A lot of that has to do with being able to integrate Zendesk with Assembled,” says Edwards. “There’s not a lot of other solutions that will integrate so seamlessly to get you the information that is going to save you costs, make your life better, improve efficiencies, and increase effectiveness on a workforce management scale.”

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 six distinct languages, we have to make sure that those are covered by the right agents.”

The powerful duo of Zendesk and Assembled provides the omnichannel support and data needed to make those pivots. Rury adds, “I can’t think of another combination of a CX platform and workforce management tool, like Zendesk and Assembled, that I know with certainty will give me accurate data.”

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. One team of agents focused on help center usage has already launched a Zendesk AI agent. This AI agent ensures that users get quick answers, and it reduces the time that agents spend on easy queries so they can work on more complex contacts. Average first reply time has already dropped to less than one hour.

The timing of the bot 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.”