Chilly’s Bottles

Supporting growth at Chilly’s Bottles with flexible resourcing

Founded in 2010, Chilly’s Bottles is a major online retailer offering reusable bottles that combine the convenience of a plastic water bottle, with the high performance technology and eco-friendly benefits of a traditional flask.

The Challenge

Seasonality and sales peaks

Chilly’s sales are seasonal, with the key sales period being in the lead up to Christmas or during promotions. This was affecting the effectiveness of the company’s customer service team, with a larger team required during peak periods, but a smaller team being sufficient for other times. As well as causing inefficiencies, this was leading to a reduction in customer satisfaction.

Getting resourcing levels right

Chilly’s became caught in a recurring cycle of recruitment and hiring, which was costing the company both time and money. After these recruitment drives it found itself with a larger than required customer service team. Chilly’s engaged Newstel because what it needed was a customer service resource that could expand or decrease quickly and effectively, but without any loss of customer service levels.

Key outcomes from our partnership with Chilly’s Bottles include:

Flexible customer service team that can be scaled up by 10x to meet business peaks (and then scaled down again)

Measured increase in customer satisfaction within just a few months

Integrated quality platform to ensure high levels of Quality Assurance across all customer management activity

The Solution

The right resources at the point of need

We quickly created a detailed adaptable resource plan with a fixed core team of customer service agents, plus the ability to effectively scale up this team when required, often at short notice.

With Newstel agents, Chilly’s can grow its customer support resource by up to ten times, such as over the Christmas period, enabling it to effectively handle the increase in enquiries and purchases. Once these periods are over, the team reduces back to the core members.

Ensuring consistent quality across all agents

We have also integrated our Evaluagent quality performance platform into Chilly’s internal system, allowing Chilly’s to conduct quality performance checks on all its agents – including those from Newstel.

This enables Chilly’s to ensure its agents are following the correct protocols and using appropriate language in emails.

The Future

We continue to support Chilly’s growth, with flexible resourcing that is helping the business to grow sales, and also to expand internationally with our multilingual customer service agents.

“We have been impressed with the knowledge and dedication of the agents provided by Newstel. The core team is now very much part of the Chilly’s Bottles team. They join in our ‘weekly huddles’ and despite working remotely we all feel as one united team. They are not simply a provider; they are a partner. They understand our business and suggest new tactics and methods which can improve our business. For example, offering language support so our customers abroad receive emails in their own language, which again, has helped to improve our customer satisfaction rating. We have been extremely impressed with Newstel and will definitely be working with them on a long-term basis and are excited about where they can help us take our business.”

Ellis Rickard, Head of Customer Experience, Chilly’s Bottles