We are a SAS software company that focuses on homelessness.
We make a case management solution for housing and service providers. And I lead all of our front facing and customer side teams.
We’ve grown pretty rapidly over the time that I’ve been working at BitFocus: we were 30 people when I first started, I think we’re close to a hundred now – and the helpdesk has been one of the bigger, faster growing pieces of that.
When you’re a small team, Workforce Management, I think, handles itself: there’s only so many ways to slice and dice it. You have 3 or 4 agents, every agent is working a full 9-to-5, Monday through Friday shift and all you have to schedule is their lunches.
But as soon as we started to add agents to the team (and it was growing pretty quickly), things started changing. We switched to the 4/10 work schedule, started building escalation paths and splitting up coverage – it suddenly became a more complex piece than we’d dealt with before.
Zendesk recommended Tymeshift to us: we were talking to our Success Rep, trying to figure out if they had ideas around a tool that would work well to handle this growing team of agents and they strongly recommended Tymeshift.
So we demo’ed it.
The fact that Tymeshift is pretty much ready to go out of the box meant it started giving value right away. Just the basic dashboard that shows all of the agents’ color-coded timelines by channel: that was super helpful.
By the time we were doing the demo, we felt very comfortable with the tool, we knew we were getting value from it, and that it was configured the way that we wanted it to be. I don’t think there was anything that was too hard for us to figure out along the way. That’s what we wanted. That was our goal. A simple, intuitive tool.
It speaks for itself, I guess, and the best thing I can say about Tymeshift is how little we’ve needed to reach out to your support teams.
Now, I have PTSD from my past legal experience and I hate tracking my time. It’s a pet peeve of mine. So I never imagined us implementing something that did that. It’s a tough job to begin with and I saw not tracking people’s time as a way to make that tough job a little easier and keep my people in a good place.
What I didn’t anticipate was how the agents themselves started to appreciate it so much. The recognition for the effort that they were putting on different pieces. The validation of the work that they’re doing around there. It was very validating on both ends.
It added transparency that went far beyond just making sure people are scheduled for the right spots.
Besides, as we were growing there were a number of decision points that we were trying to make – concerning escalation, and coverage for those different tiers, and reasonable benchmarks for different types of tickets, et cetera.
And it gave us the hard data that validated our gut feelings. It gave us more faith in what we were trying to move forward with.
The industry is moving faster. So the tickets are getting more complex. And figuring out how to properly build capacity around that, where to invest in professional development, understanding where there are potential opportunities to improve efficiencies – just across the board Tymeshift has been very helpful.
We would wholeheartedly recommend it. Our Zendesk implementation would have been much more successful from the get go if we had started out with a tool like Tymeshift. No hesitation: just recommend diving into it.
