Kinsa Customer Happiness: Built to Scale With BrightReps

There is nothing more important in life than health and family. So, when an illness strikes, it can be an incredibly difficult time for you and your loved ones.

At Kinsa it is their mission to provide a smart thermometer solution that supports you from the first sign of illness through recovery and beyond by focusing on what’s most important – what to do next.

Upon taking your temperature, Kinsa’s smart thermometer device and application provides personalized guidance on treatment, reminders of when and the dosage of medication to take, stores all your family’s health information, and can even provide a detailed overview of illnesses circulating in your child’s school to get a better idea of what’s going around. It is this level of support throughout the journey of an illness that differentiates Kinsa and has resulted in hundreds of thousands of healthy and happy customers.

Off-Hours Coverage

Sickness can strike at any time, including nights and weekends.

While many companies offer customer support from 9 AM to 5 PM Monday through Friday, Kinsa strives to go above and beyond to support their customers – including outside of working hours.

Offering an extended level of support coverage is a tremendous differentiator for companies, but it is also incredibly difficult to hire and staff for the part-time and off-hour requirements of the position.  As Andrew Wilkinson, Head of Customer Happiness at Kinsa, explains, “It’s really hard as a startup company to find high quality candidates that are only looking for 8-10 hours of work on the weekends, have technical skills, and are personable, friendly and empathetic.”

In addition to being difficult to recruit part-time candidates with the appropriate skill set, it was increasingly difficult for Kinsa to justify the upfront onboarding time and cost for a part-time position. Fortunately, BrightReps’ platform offered a compelling solution for these challenges.

As part of optimizing his team’s workflows, Wilkinson built his team’s core processes on the BrightReps Sidekick app – providing a simplified step by step workflow for Kinsa’s agents. In doing so Kinsa not only streamlined workflows and onboarding for their internal team, but also provided a framework to easily scale an outsourced team.

In addition to eliminating the typical pain points and obstacles of onboarding, BrightReps offered a compelling solution for hiring. As part of their mission to provide a platform for teams to scale their organization, BrightReps partnered with best in-class support providers to offer flexible on-demand support agents that can execute workflows and provide the necessary level of support to their client’s customers.

Working with BrightReps, Kinsa was able to quickly screen agents from a pool of specially qualified support professionals and add agents to their team with minimal notice. As Wilkinson elaborates, “We don’t have to go through the traditional hiring process that requires opening a job listing, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training which takes precious time away from an already bandwidth constrained team.”

By hiring agents through BrightReps, Kinsa was able to find and onboard phenomenal part time agents in a fraction of the time of alternative options. Better yet, thanks to the step by step instructions provided by Sidekick, the on-demand agents didn’t require off-hours management from Kinsa’s core team.

This level of flexibility has enabled Kinsa to support their customers outside of typical business hours, without requiring their core team to work double-time through off-hours or weekends.

Preparing for Seasonal Spikes

Kinsa’s support volume, like most businesses, experiences large seasonal fluctuations.

“For flu season we get roughly 3X increase in support volume”, says Wilkinson. While support demand may be manageable in the “off-season”, peak season volume poses a significant challenge to maintaining the exceptional level of support that Kinsa’s customers expect to receive year-round.

Traditionally, seasonal support has been extremely difficult and expensive to staff due to the high upfront cost of hiring and onboarding for a temporary role. As a result, most companies are faced with the tough decision to overpay for a larger full-time team or compromise their support quality and SLAs during peak seasons.

Fortunately, BrightReps offered a solution without compromise. By working with BrightReps for workflow optimization, and off-hours staffing, Kinsa is able to plan and staff for these seasonal spikes without the excessive fixed onboarding costs and agent minimums of traditional call centers.

Customer Happiness means being there for your customers when they need you. Whether it’s weekends or peak flu season, it has been Kinsa’s mission to be there for their customers in their moment of need.

It is this commitment to ALWAYS putting customers first that truly differentiates Kinsa’s customer experience.