GardaWorld Freshens Its Service Capabilities

GardaWorld is a privately owned security services company offering a wide range of services, including refilling ATMs and transporting cash via armored vehicles to and from retailers, financial services firms, and other businesses. As such, it’s critical that company managers have their fingers on the pulse of current conditions to provide top-level service to customers, retain their business, and attract new customers, says Nicholas Spagnuolo, senior director of the U.S. Operations Support Center at GardaWorld Cash Services in Boca Raton, Fla.

“When a customer contacts us because an ATM needs to be serviced or a safe needs to be filled, it’s an emergency for them,” Spagnuolo says.

But responding to each of those little—and, sometimes, not so little—emergencies wasn’t always easy. With GardaWorld’s legacy customer service system, customer could really only call in. Conducting business via email wasn’t a viable option because the software was so limited. Emails couldn’t be searched and automatic notifications weren’t possible, meaning that many emails never received the level of attention they needed.

So in 2018, executives at the Montreal-
based company started searching for a solution that would enable them to be more responsive to customer needs. Within a little more than a month, GardaWorld chose the Freshdesk customer service software from Freshworks.

GardaWorld had the cloud-based software fully installed by the end of July, about two months after signing the contract with Freshworks. The company beta-tested the software with just a few of its clients for a few weeks before the full implementation.

Freshworks was involved with the entire implementation, according to Spagnuolo, which he says was “critically important.”

“They showed us how best to use the solution within our company. We had asked our agents what their pain points were, and Freshworks was very engaged in helping to solve them,” he adds.

One of the biggest benefits of the new solution has been the way it’s enabled the company to efficiently service customers via email so that time doesn’t need to be wasted on the phone.

The intelligent routing algorithm by Freshworks auto-assigns customer queries from different channels to agents who can offer immediate support.

“We needed to implement a rules-based approach based on subject lines,” Spagnuolo says. “We’ve installed 20 different rules-based routing rules. Now we can route emails to different agents based on keywords and subject lines. Now urgent emails get noticed immediately. And we know when to escalate the emails.”

Additionally, the software provides automatic notification when emails are received by clients. When a client responds, the response is appended to the original email.

The software includes a built-in load balancing engine (Omniroute) for multichannel customer inquiries. Omniroute gives customer service agents a unified view of customer inquiries regardless of channel.

Another important feature of Freshdesk, Spagnuolo says, is a 360-degree view of customers. An agent calling back has access to all previous emails, chats, calls, and social media interactions with that customer. “Now our agents have the full story,” Spagnuolo says

Thanks to the intelligent routing and ability to automatically prioritize emails, the company’s average time to close customer service tickets has dropped from six days to less than three, according to Spagnuolo.

With the routing engine, agents on break won’t be assigned live chats, but they can still receive email queries for response when they return to their desks. The system uses Freshworks’ artificial intelligence engine, Freddy, to constantly learn and improve the routing performance to minimize wait times.

“Now our agents have more time to provide customer service,” Spagnuolo says.

The improved efficiency provided by the email automation and intelligent routing has also enabled GardaWorld to continue growing without adding additional support staff. Before implementing Freshdesk, Spagnuolo had expected to need four additional employees to keep up with the company’s growth.

The software’s reporting feature enables GardaWorld to uncover trends, such as an increase in the number of customer contacts related to ATM shortages. In cases like that, GardaWorld can then take corrective action, like filling machines with more cash or filling them more often.

Based on its success in the current deployment, Spagnuolo expects to expand Freshdesk to other departments within GardaWorld in the not-too-distant future. 

The Payoff

Since installing FreshDesk, GardaWorld has done the following:

• created 20 routing rules to send customers to the right agents;
• reduced the average number of days required to close cases from six to two; and
• avoided having to add four full-time employees to the support group.