Getting to Know Otto Broker

Otto Broker is one of the largest employers in insurance brokerage in Romania, with a team of 100 people. Their retail division operates from shopping centers in Bucharest and other major cities in Romania, while the corporate division caters to larger businesses from their headquarters in Bucharest. In their 20 years of experience in retail and corporate insurance, they have developed long-term collaborations with their clients and partners, building a reputation for offering the most suitable coverage solutions.

The Challenges

Continuous Communication, Multiple Channels, Limited Integration

For Otto Broker, continuous communication is the backbone of their relationship with their clients. They must be at their disposal with continuous advice and information, from choosing the right policy to the time of the claim.

This need led them to open up multiple channels to be in touch with their customers, including physical offices, email, chat, phone, and Whatsapp. During the pandemic, they experienced a surge in the volume of customer queries across channels that posed a challenge to the team. They were also trying to move away from WhatsApp because of privacy concerns.

However, the lack of integration between the different channels added complexity and prevented them from providing a seamless experience to their customers. We spoke to Cristian Balaban, Project Manager & Administrative Director at Otto Broker, to understand how they solved this challenge and where Freshworks came into the mix.

The Solution

Unified Customer Experience, 360-View of Customers

The primary goal of the Contact Center team at Otto Broker was simple – no customer query should go unattended. They also wanted to ensure that their customers get a unified experience across channels and that the agents have a 360 view of customer interactions. To tie it all together, they needed a solution that could integrate the different channels and help them offer seamless and scalable support.

Thus, Otto Broker started exploring a CX solution that was easy to use, could handle the volume, and brought together all customer communications in one place. They began organizing a pitch for both internal and international solution providers. Their search ended with them choosing Freshdesk Omnichannel.

Incidentally, Freshdesk Omnichannel was the first integrated CX solution the team ever used. The advantages the platform brought to the CX organization at Otto Broker made it easy for them to find advocates for Freshdesk within the team and convince them to adopt the solution. The fact that the interface was user-friendly and intuitive only strengthened the decision to choose the platform.

Today they are in a place where they can train new agents themselves to use Freshdesk, thanks to the Digital Adoption program at Freshworks. The Program has helped them discover new features that could be useful for them in offering omnichannel support at scale.

The Features They Loved

The Omnichannel capabilities in Freshdesk were a deal-breaker for Otto Broker, but some specific features made their CX especially delightful – for both customers and agents.

Integrated telephony with the helpdesk

The ability to make calls within Freshdesk and convert a call to a ticket with a single click with Freshdesk Contact Center helped agents at Otto Broker do more in less time. They could continue to have conversations across any channel with every customer. Besides, with the Contact Center’s Bring your own carrier (BYOC), they managed to integrate local phone numbers with Freshdesk and save on support costs. “We have integrated two Romanian numbers with Freshdesk which proved to be cost-effective compared to using international numbers or providers like Twilio when using the phone as a primary support channel,” shares Cristian.

Actionable insights into team performance

Freshdesk made tracking the agents’ performance easy. The Contact Center reporting and analytics module enabled the team leaders to track what happened in a call by using call recordings, post-call transcripts, and call-lifecycle information. They could monitor agent performance, spot call trends, and volume trends, and see if their customers are satisfied with the support they receive on live dashboards.

Easy to find customer history

To ensure that no customer query goes unanswered, it was important for the CS team at Otto Broker to have context into their customer’s journey. Having a 360-view of the customer before responding to a query or taking a call helped the agents to resolve tickets faster and identify any gaps/issues beforehand and saved customers from the frustration of repeating themselves. Unified customer profiles and prescriptive subsequent best actions helped agents be more productive on the calls.

Proper categorization of tickets

The ability to add tags to the tickets helped agents at Otto Broker to track and segregate them based on issues or requests. This meant they could identify their customers’ fundamental problems and identify top customer queries to streamline their support further. Otto Broker discovered this feature during one of their Digital Adoption calls with the team at Freshworks.

They can’t imagine going back – The Freshworks Impact

This sums up how the team at Otto Broker feels about Freshdesk and its impact on their customer service.

Technically speaking, Freshdesk has helped Otto Broker manage the surge in incoming queries, resolve more queries, reduce the resolution times, and ultimately stay true to its philosophy of not making customers wait for a response.

“There’s nothing worse than customers asking for your product and you not being able to give it to them or serve them. And I think with Freshdesk, we could serve more customers and, of course, serve them better!” exclaims Christian while speaking of the impact of our helpdesk on their CX operations.

Today, Otto Broker has rerouted all of their 20 phone numbers from their selling offices to Freshdesk. If the sales office agents are busy and can’t answer calls, they are automatically redirected to Freshdesk, and the contact center agents can pick it up. There’s no more waiting or queues for the customers. This has made the agents’ life easier and enabled Otto Broker to provide better, integrated support to their customers.

What the Future Holds for Otto Broker and Freshworks

Otto Broker wants to take its idea of seamless, integrated customer support to the next level with Freshworks. As the next step, they are currently testing the integration of Freshdesk with their internal platform that caters to the overall management of the insurance policies. This platform is connected with the web services of all the insurance companies and can provide real-time quotes. Integrating it with Freshdesk would mean that agents can see all information regarding the customer and their insurance policy inside a pop-up, right on their screens when a customer calls. This will enable the agent to have more informed interactions with the customer.