Do you wish your house was cleaner, but don’t want to do it yourself? Or that chore was taken care of by the time you came home from work?
No wonder why Spruce is gaining in popularity, serving over 1 million multifamily and short-term rentals with house cleaning, chores, and other lifestyle services to residents across the US. Partnering with local housekeeping companies, Spruce empowers service professionals to grow their business. Spruce has teamed up with over 200 property management companies across 21 markets to provide residents with an added convenience of their on-demand services or turnover management.
Because Spruce manages several customer categories, their support team experiences a high volume of inquiries — all with different preferences in communication, whether through live chat, Slack, or email. That’s why they use Front to consolidate their channels and integrate with their existing technologies for more streamlined support operations.
Challenge
As Spruce grew, so did their bookings — they went from 30 bookings per day to 400 bookings per day. Residents were communicating through SMS, service providers through Slack, and property managers through email. It was difficult to see who had answered what with support agents responding to all channels at once, causing delayed response times or missing messages altogether.
With no visibility, Spruce couldn’t pinpoint where to optimize their customer experience, what improvements could be made to their app, or if they were overstaffing or understaffing shifts based on demand.
Additionally, it was hard to get an overview of the performance of various siloed channels. Any communications happening in Slack could not be incorporated into analytics. Residents used to be able to call in, but phone calls took far longer to resolve and the system was expensive to maintain.
Solution
Seamless collaboration lifts burden off an agent’s workday
With various channels to manage, Spruce turned to Front to consolidate everything into one place. This not only made onboarding, training, and coaching easier, but it also allowed for the support team to collaborate more efficiently within their team and cross-functionally. Better collaboration boosted team morale, which improved employee retention by 60% with regretted attrition dropping from 19% in 2022 to 6% in 2023.
Morale is impacted by our ability to communicate with each other. That’s why our agents who’ve worked in support roles elsewhere say they love the way collaboration is handled in Front, because GIFs, emojis, and comments make team interactions and coaching that much more fun.
Many of Spruce’s support agents work remotely and part time, so handoffs were easier when everyone was working on the same platform. Shifts were able to leave internal notes for each other to quickly catch up on open inquiries. And escalations became more streamlined, where managers could automatically be notified and address time-sensitive issues faster.
It was also easier tagging in other teams, like passing off business inquiries to the Short Term Rental team or payment inquiries to their billing team with a simple @mention. The seamless collaboration contributed to improving response time by 63%.
Spruce reduced cost by switching to chat support and staffing correctly
Spruce saved an estimated $62K per year by replacing their phone support with Front Chat. They were pleased at how easy it was to integrate Front Chat onto their website and mobile app. The switch didn’t hinder their customers from reaching Spruce’s support team, and it freed up agents to handle multiple conversations rather than one phone call at a time.
Spruce was able to further reduce costs through efficient staffing. By using a combination of the Busiest Times reporting in Front analytics and Service Level Agreement (SLA) workflows, Spruce could determine whether staffing was adequate during shifts and plan for headcount accordingly. They were able to forecast message volume more accurately with the Busiest Times report, which they used to properly staff shifts that were experiencing higher inbound messages. When SLAs were met 90% of the time, that meant there were enough agents working that shift to not feel overwhelmed responding to customers in time. All in all, Spruce reduced their support costs by 16%, totaling $382,497.
Analytics revealed paths to improved customer satisfaction
Spruce’s support team saved time responding to frequently asked questions with message templates. Liz was able to review the template reporting in Front Analytics to understand trends within customer inquiries. For example, she saw her support team was sending less move out cleaning message templates — meaning the improvements Spruce made to their move out service cleaning service was working if customers needed less help from customer support. By continuously monitoring message template use and specific tags set in Front, Liz was able to use this data to help pinpoint customer issues and track that requests for customer support were decreasing rather than increasing.
Results
After switching phone support to Front Chat, planning for correct headcount, and reducing regretted attrition, Spruce saved a total of $444,762. They reduced support cost per booking by 31% from $9 to $6.42. In total, Spruce saw 591% ROI enabled through Front!
Spruce optimized their support operations to better serve their customer categories after consolidating channels, ensuring seamless integration within their tech stack, and gaining visibility into their performance. Their improvements did not go unnoticed by their customers — Spruce saw their CSAT score increase by 23% in less than a year.
The happiness didn’t just stop at customers. The average employee tenure increased by a massive 41% to 16.5 months, and Spruce was certified as a Great Place to Work from 2022 to 2023. Liz says, “the team has such an easier time when customer communication is streamlined with Front. Front keeps everything trackable in one place and helps us avoid unnecessary and redundant questions.”
