TEquipment is a global test and measurement distributor serving engineering giants like Boeing, General Mills, and SpaceX. To become the trusted partner of these pioneering brands, TEquipment has not only prioritized delivering high-quality products, but offering top-notch customer service.
No matter where customers sit across the globe, they can count on TEquipment staff to get their questions answered and their problems solved, fast. In an industry where waiting days for a response is customary, TEquipment has an unmatched 15-minute SLA — even during periods of rapid company expansion. The secret sauce to this exceptional customer service? Front.
Challenge
TEquipment has always prided itself on excellent customer service. But before Front, their teams were struggling to uphold it. Their support tech stack was effectively a black box. No one knew exactly where customer emails went.
Often, they ended up in the wrong inbox, and sometimes they were lost entirely. Due to limited collaboration abilities with their previous tooling, specialized sales reps would have slower response times as they needed to wait for messages to be forwarded to them. Other times, messages would get held in an employee’s inbox, making it difficult to see what was still pending. And messages would be left unanswered if an employee was out on vacation.
David Aviles, P.E. at TEquipment, is responsible for sourcing and deploying new tech across the company and shares: “Prior to Front, email was challenging, to be honest. We were losing emails and there were issues with routing, with no clarity or transparency from our previous vendor about how or where things were going. And the old systems we were using weren’t set up for internal collaboration, making it very hard to work together to solve customer problems.”
Their previous vendor was originally implemented because of its “all-in-one” capabilities. Yet the lack of clarity around who was handling certain issues and lack of visibility across teams were prolonging the time it took for tickets to get resolved, putting TEquipment’s reputation at risk.
“We were losing emails. We were having issues. The system was just too complicated,” David emphasizes. “We needed a tool that was flexible to configure and easy to use.”
Solution
David had a hunch that Front might be a good fit for TEquipment, but before jumping to a new platform, he wanted to be sure. So he scheduled a demo.
Right away, I knew Front would be the solution for us to go with. I’d say the demo was really the evaluation, proving that Front is flexible, configurable, and that we could easily run more than one team in Front and collaborate smoothly.
Maintaining clear ownership and seamless transitions with automation rules
TEquipment’s customer-facing teams are highly cross-functional. When a request comes into the contact center, it likely won’t stay there for long. Typically, another specialized team — sales, logistics, accounting — needs to weigh in.
To get customers a quick reply, emails and chats need to route to the correct team with all the context at their fingertips. Thanks to Front’s automation rules, TEquipment has eliminated manual forwarding as much as possible, sending messages directly to the appropriate team to be handled. TEquipment System Administrator, Hemanshu Agnihotri, elaborates:
“We’ve been able to identify certain patterns and send emails to specific teams based on the sender subject line — even emails outside of the core contact center team. For example, we have notifications that pertain to returns, and we automatically route those to our RMA team.”
Any comments or additional feedback from the contact center are captured in Front and accessible to the person(s) working the case. If they want a second set of eyes on their reply, Front users can loop in their managers for review.
With Front’s built-in audit trail, admins can also pinpoint and immediately fix any breakdowns in communication. David highlights, “If we have issues, we can dive into the audit log and see why a certain rule is executing – maybe the trigger is off, or there’s a bug in the type of rule. No matter what, it’s fast and easy to rectify the problem.”
Achieving an industry-leading SLA with load balancing and SLA rules
Before Front, it would take 6 hours, on average, for TEquipment to reply to customers. With a constant influx of emails, it was tough for contact center reps to keep their conversations organized. Plus, any messages that didn’t pertain to them had to be forwarded to someone else, who then had to reply before the rep could get back to the end customer.
This lengthy back-and-forth was affecting relationships with existing customers and hindering the company’s ability to close future revenue. Per David, “One of our founders and I looked at the data and discovered that we could be converting more deals if we were able to send a quote within the first 30 minutes of a prospect contacting us.”
With Front at their disposal, David and Hemanshu developed load balancing rules to better distribute work among teammates and configured SLA rules to warn staff members when messages are sitting for too long.
For extra coverage, they also leverage an overseas team to review tickets awaiting a response. If a message doesn’t seem to be routed to the proper person, the offshore team will transfer it to someone else and ping the new assignee so they review it ASAP.
Their goal with these changes was to cut response times in half to 4 hours. With Front, they’ve slashed response times to 15 minutes — an astonishing 95% decrease. According to Hemanshu, they’ve set the SLA bar extremely high for their industry:
A typical response time in our industry can range from a couple hours to days. With Front we’re able to respond within 15 minutes, so we deliver almost instantly in comparison.
Getting new employees up and running faster with an intuitive UI and knowledge base
TEquipment was recently acquired by TestEquity, one of the largest stocking distributors of test and measurement solutions. As a result, they’ve had to onboard dozens more employees, and more are expected in the new year.
Thankfully, Front’s user-friendly interface makes training fairly straightforward. “Front takes the headache out of having to onboard, train, and set a new system up for multiple teams,” Hemanshu explains.
“It’s a really intuitive platform,” says Hemanshu. “Teams quickly understand exactly where things are in Front, and how things work. Follow-up is minimal because the system is so self-explanatory. If you’re familiar with an inbox model, your transition to Front is going to be seamless.”
If reps do have additional questions, they can dive into Front’s knowledge base for help. The internal resource reduces time to onboard and assists employees with answering any inquiries that come their way.
“Front’s knowledge base makes it easy for teams to quickly access the information they need in one central place,” says David. “It’s a more seamless experience for our employees, our customers get faster responses, and we save on operating costs by not having to pay another vendor for the tool. It’s a win-win-win.”
They have an external-facing knowledge base as well, meaning customers can self-serve — ultimately reducing the number of tickets coming through TEquipment’s contact center.
Using analytics to drive and measure impact
One of the biggest unlocks from Front has been its built-in analytics, giving David and Hemanshu a better sense of how teams are performing and where bottlenecks are occurring.
“The biggest piece was just becoming more aware as a business,” explains David. “We had an idea of how long things were taking but didn’t have all the details we have now. In Front, you can see what’s going on in real time.”
With those numbers and visuals at their disposal, David and Hemanshu can make strategic tweaks to their process and measure the effectiveness of those changes over time. “That’s really how we are able to refine our operations and get our response times smaller and smaller,” David explains.
As far as the future goes, the TEquipment team is continuing to push the envelope, reducing their SLA even more — without compromising service quality. “As long as our team and our customers are happy, that’s my main focus,” says David. “In that way, Front pays for itself.”
