How Kinsa Streamlined Returns Using BrightReps

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

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.

Great Growth and Challenges

As Kinsa grew, so did their internal processes and systems supporting each product and initiative.  Like most organizations, this type of growth created a significant burden on their Customer Happiness team responsible for supporting customers throughout their journey.

In addition to implementing Zendesk as their core CRM, Kinsa adopted an ordering platform to fulfill and manage orders, a shipping platform to fulfill and manage returns, and a product lifecycle tool to track and manage product quality.  As Andrew Wilkinson, Head of Customer Happiness at Kinsa describes, “Not only did our agents need to learn all these different platforms including Arena, ShipStation, and Shopify but we also had to learn and maintain all of our growing internal processes and policies for using these platforms too.”

By investing in a great purpose-built tool and well documented processes, Kinsa was able to deliver exceptional customer experiences, but it came at the price of significant time and cost required to onboard new employees, train existing agents, and fulfill everyday customer requests.

This inefficiency was especially apparent in their returns processes which required confirming the initial order and customer information, logging into and creating a replacement order on Shopify, logging into and creating a return shipping label on ShipStation, logging into and creating a quality process on Arena, and then replying to the customer with the order information and return shipping label. As Andrew Wilkinson, Head of Customer Happiness at Kinsa, highlights, “These are three different systems we had to learn and go to outside of Zendesk just to fulfill a single customer request.”

By having to learn, access, and copy and paste data across multiple systems just to complete a single request, the returns process was quickly becoming a significant time burden. In fact, as Wilkinson explains, “this process from start to finish took around 30 minutes to complete”.

Process Improved with Integrations

Upon learning about BrightReps’ workflow optimization platform, Wilkinson was immediately drawn to the idea of implementing a fully integrated workflow to streamline their RMA process. What really differentiated BrightReps as a solution, wasn’t just the product but the experience of working with the team to achieve Kinsa’s business goals.

Wilkinson elaborates, “The BrightReps team was incredibly responsive and open to feedback and new integrations. They’re also committed to making us successful and creating the best product.”

Within a week of working with the BrightReps team, Kinsa had fully integrated their RMA process so that an agent could complete an RMA without leaving the Zendesk ticket. This included the ability to track the workflow progress and customer follow up attempts, a critical feature for FDA compliance.  Better yet, they could now complete this process in under 5 minutes. These time savings were critical for a customer-first company like Kinsa.

Following the success of optimizing their RMA process, Kinsa has worked closely with BrightReps to continue optimizing their full library of core processes. This continuous process improvement has cumulatively amounted to a significant cost reduction for Kinsa. As Wilkinson proclaims, “BrightReps has saved me hundreds of hours of tedious manual data entry and everything from onboarding to day-to-day operations is so much more streamlined as a result”.

In addition to reducing the time to complete their most painful workflows, BrightReps dramatically reduced the time to manage workflows. “The power of BrightReps’ integrations is phenomenal. It is so flexible we can codify a new process with integrations and roll it out right away.”, says Wilkinson. By following the step-by-step guidance of Sidekick, Kinsa was able to cut the time spent onboarding and maintaining process documentation in half and eliminate the need to schedule ongoing all-team meetings for routine process updates.

It is this level of flexibility and efficiencies that help Kinsa continue to grow, without sacrificing the happiness of their customers.