Wellhub scales with Zendesk and sees 20% increase in productivity

One of the biggest roadblocks to physical activity is finding a fitness routine that’s convenient, enjoyable, and affordable. Finding the time to make the weekly slog to the gym to do the same workout is one of the reasons many people stop going altogether, or don’t start in the first place.

That’s why Wellhub, the worldwide fitness discovery platform, is working to make it easy to participate in a wide variety of workouts that include gyms, yoga and martial arts studios, boot camps, cycling, and dance classes—right from within your community, or anywhere you go.

Available as a corporate benefit with flexible, rolling monthly contracts, Wellhub provides access to more than 800 sports, classes and physical activities, and more than 45,000 gyms and studios, across 14 countries and 7,000 cities worldwide. Since it was established in 2012, Wellhub has experienced exponential growth, helping millions of employees to incorporate fitness into their lives.

“Everyone wins with Wellhub’s three-sided marketplace,” said Rafael Sobral, director of operations at Wellhub Latin America (LatAm). “HR gets more engaged and productive employees, plus lower health insurance costs; employees get access to physical activity in a more versatile and affordable way; and gyms get more traffic flow. It’s a win-win-win model.”

Those wins tally up and amount to substantial reductions in healthcare costs. Plus, employers get a 50-70 percent subsidy off retail membership prices, and Wellhub’s client companies report that an active employee is two times more likely to stay in the company and absenteeism can be reduced by 50 percent.

Gyms and studies benefit from the increase in demand for existing classes. According to a worldwide study run by Wellhub, over 70% of the new traffic Wellhub brings to these businesses is incremental.

The fast-growing company was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which is where Sobral heads up LatAm operations. His team of 80 agents provide support in Portuguese and Spanish and handle between 50,000 and 100,000 tickets every month.

Wellhub LatAm implemented Zendesk in May of 2018 because it was looking for an omnichannel solution that would allow the organization to scale operations over time. Sobral’s team started out with Zendesk Chat and gradually added Support, Guide, and Explore.

“We have about a hundred people working in LatAm customer support and the team is growing quite fast,” Sobral said. “After we launched Zendesk, we were able to catch up in terms of productivity and absorb the increase in demand without over-growing the team.”

He reports that, almost instantly, they saw a 20 to 30 percent increase in productivity in the channels that were migrated to Zendesk. “Even for the channels that are not currently integrated into Zendesk, there were also improvements since we were centralizing all the CRM interfaces,” he said.

Wellhub is standardizing its global customer experience strategy so everyone is working toward the same goals. All support teams use the same technology and best practices. To that end, the U.S. and European offices are also rolling out Zendesk to their operations teams.

In LatAm, Chat has proven to be a robust solution that has improved customer support for both customers and Wellhub employees. “Chat allows us to create rules that allow us to proactively interact with our clients in a given stage of a user flow within the website or the app. By being able to request feedback in a chat, we can now track quality of service over time, and better manage tickets and attribute them through Zendesk to our second and third levels of customer support.”

As the company continues to grow, Wellhub is looking to increase the integration with its CRM and to introduce more automation. “The team is running the analysis and building dashboards in Explore. It’s a much easier and faster way to build queries and access the data that’s behind Zendesk and in the ticketing database,” said Sobral.

The Customer Support Planning and Planning Analytics teams have made good use of Explore with optimization analysis forecasts, and inbound call, chat, and email analysis, where issues are broken down by category, company, and client segments. Sobral says this has allowed Wellhub LatAm to close the feedback loop with support teams and solve problems in a more structured way.

“We’ve been using Zendesk data that comes out of Explore to identify the most critical reasons our customers are getting in contact with us. And with that, building a roadmap of potential improvements from both an operations and product perspective.”

Sobral says this allows customer support to become a center for insights and provides inputs to improve service.

“One thing we recently did was to look into the data to understand the issues that teams were seeking support for, and then focus on fixing the root cause so that ultimately we could reduce these recurring issues and the load on the team. We were able to do that,” Sobral said.

From a self-service perspective, as the team migrated pre-existing FAQs into Zendesk Guide, the Planning Analytics team also made help center content easily searchable by tagging articles with relevant words.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of improvement in the performance of the help center. On average, there’s been a 10 percent increase in click-through rate just by doing simple tagging, which is great,” said Sobral. “Our self-service has become more professional, which is something our customers appreciate.”

With regional teams around the world, a good cultural and linguistic fit is key to customer service for Wellhub. Sobral says this localization is why they have internal customer support teams and don’t outsource operations.

“The way we see it, customer support is critical to the sustainability of the business. We’ve been investing in this team, and adopting Zendesk is just one example of how we do that. We’re also starting to track quality and client-perception data, such as NPS, internal quality assurance reviews, CSAT, and so on.”

Wellhub LatAm’s meticulous attention to detail when it comes to customer support has paid off in an interesting way—Wellhub won a prestigious business award in Brazil from a popular website where consumers share their customer service experiences and tally votes for businesses. “We won the award because we always get back to our customers, we answer their questions, and we solve their problems,” said Sobral.