Case Study: Transforming eType Services' Customer Support and Onboarding

The Client

eType Services is a digital publishing solutions provider that helps community newspapers in their transition to the online landscape. The company, founded by seasoned publishing and technology professionals, focuses on delivering affordable and user-friendly digital products and services. Their core mission is to equip small and medium-sized newspapers with the tools they need to expand their readership and generate new revenue streams in the digital era.

The Challenge: Inefficient Processes and Barriers to Growth

eType Services faced significant operational challenges that created a roadblock to scaling their business, serving new clients, and providing new services. The company came to Cognita seeking assistance with process documentation and self-help options, but a deeper discovery process uncovered larger support and onboarding issues.

The primary pain points were:

  • Fragmented Customer Support: The support team managed all customer requests using a combination of Gmail and Google spreadsheets. This system provided very little visibility into the volume of requests, the nature of customer issues, or levels of customer satisfaction. The team was often overwhelmed daily by having to handle multiple emails.

  • Lack of Self-Service and Documentation: There were no self-help options available, forcing customers to contact support for even simple issues. This required a lengthy process of identification and troubleshooting for every problem. Furthermore, the lack of consistent internal support documentation meant new hires took an exceedingly long time to get up to speed and required significant one-on-one interaction with tenured staff.

  • Disorganized Onboarding and Offboarding: The client onboarding process was managed with spreadsheets, lacking a single, unified point of entry into the eType Services platform. Different staff members added new customers to the system at multiple points using undocumented processes.

These combined issues made it difficult to provide consistent support and hindered the company's ability to grow. As a small company, their staff was primarily focused on just providing day-to-day support, leaving little time for strategic improvements. They needed a trusted, independent advisor to help them find solutions.

The Engagement: A Strategic Approach

Cognita was engaged on a monthly retainer basis with the goal of completing a full review and implementing recommendations within 60 days. The first step was a thorough assessment of eType Services' support operations, which included interviews with key stakeholders and a review of their existing technology stack and documentation.

Drawing on prior experience in the newspaper publishing industry and deep expertise in customer support operations, Cognita was able to understand the client's unique challenges, identify the failure points within their support organization, and develop a clear strategy to rectify them.

The Solution: A Multifaceted Strategy for Efficiency

Cognita developed a multifaceted solution to address eType Services' core problems:

  1. Technology Implementation: Cognita guided eType Services through the evaluation of different customer support platforms, ultimately helping them select and implement Front. This platform replaced their reliance on Gmail and spreadsheets and offered several key advantages:

    • Internal and External Knowledge Bases: Front provided the ability to create structured documentation for both the internal support team and for customers, enabling self-service, faster issue resolution and quicker new hire ramp time.

    • Native Analytics: The platform included analytics capabilities, allowing management to finally understand the nature of support requests, resolution times, and customer satisfaction levels.

  2. Process Improvement: A second discovery and deep dive was conducted into the client onboarding process. From this, Cognita developed a business requirements document designed to improve the eType Services platform and make client onboarding more efficient. eType was able to provide this document to their developer for further action.

The Results: A Foundation for Long-Term Success

The solutions provided by Cognita had an immediate and lasting impact. The eType Services team was very satisfied, successfully implementing Front and training users within the first month of the engagement.

Key outcomes include:

  • Increased Efficiency: By building a customer-facing knowledge base, the support team are now handling customer issues more efficiently and is less overwhelmed. They are also looking forward to improving the content to deflect more contacts in the future.

  • Improved Employee Training: The new documentation and processes serve as a playbook that allows eType Services to hire new support employees and ramp them up in 25 percent faster.

  • Strategic Platform Development: The recommendations for the onboarding process are being used to drive productive conversations with their software development team for long-term improvements to the eType Services platform.

  • Operational Data: Thanks to the analytics tools provided by Front, eType leadership is now able to better understand how the support team operates. They are now able to track ticket volumes, top support drivers, time to resolution, and more.

Cognita's efforts have set up eType Services for long-term success, giving them a foundation to scale their business, serve additional clients, and provide new services. Without this engagement, they would have remained stuck in an inefficient operation, unable to grow their business going forward.