Sunbasket makes QA 66% faster, reduces time spent on reporting by 60%, and improves Customer Effort Score by 4% with Pathlight

For Sunbasket, a subscription-based meal delivery service focused on using farm-fresh, organic ingredients that are delivered to subscribers and ready to enjoy in minutes, the customer experience rules everything. “Our team really cares about our customers because we know that the customer service experience goes a long way for retaining them and preventing them from canceling their subscriptions or moving to a different service,” says Daniel Simon, Sunbasket’s Business Systems Analyst.

Daniel handles all reporting and analytics for the customer service portion of Sunbasket’s business. He gathers data, compiles it, and makes it intelligible for leadership and others across the organization. In addition to reporting, Daniel runs Sunbasket’s CRM, manages marketing and promotional emails, and guides projects that improve customer service. He works closely with Kim Torres, Sunbasket’s Quality Assurance Lead. 

Kim audits all agents who join the team, tracks issues and trends, and shares them with team leads to drive continuous improvement across the customer support organization. Having started her career as an agent, Kim has deep knowledge of both the agent and manager side of the function, which helps her ensure great experiences all around. 

The importance of customer support at Sunbasket

“It’s been our mission since the beginning to provide the easiest experience for customers,” explains Daniel. “We built the team to focus on the customer experience, improve customer satisfaction scores, and, ultimately, make it easier for customers to solve their problems by leaning on our team.” 

To measure the customer service team’s success, Kim and Daniel rely on performance metrics and a Quality Assurance (QA) score, which comprises of: 

• Agent Satisfaction rate (ASAT), or how satisfied a customer was with an agent’s service,
• Resolution, or whether the customer’s issue was resolved, and
• Cases per hour, the number of cases an agent handles over time. 

The tedious work of manually managing QA

While their QA scores were a good indicator of how the customer experience was going, gathering the data, analyzing it, and making it available to agents was difficult for Kim and Daniel. They did everything manually, including updating Excel and Google Sheets and creating reports for leadership on a weekly basis. 

The process was time-consuming to say the least, and it created a lack of visibility for leaders and agents alike. There was no place for agents to see their scores until their one-on-one meetings with their managers. It was only during one-on-ones that they would get a snapshot of their quality scores, usually a week or more after a scorecard was graded or a customer survey completed. What’s more, accessing their QA scores was a cumbersome process: They would receive an email from Salesforce for every scorecard submitted, which they had to individually open to review. 

To make matters worse, graders and agents alike found their existing QA scorecards hard to understand. Scores were just numbers on a 1-5 rating scale with no granular information or feedback to help agents improve.  

The missing link: Lacking a connection between performance and QA

Further, performance and QA weren’t linked for agents, creating a disjointed view of their overall achievement. Without a centralized view of QA scores and other key performance indicators, including goals and feedback, agents weren’t engaged with their metrics or aware of how their QA scores and overall performance were linked. 

All of these challenges resulted in agent disengagement and uncomfortable one-on-one conversations. Lack of realtime visibility into performance metrics or quality scores inhibited an agent’s ability to self-manage and drive continuous improvement. So, Daniel and the team set out to improve the QA and performance management process for agents, graders, and leaders—in order to improve the customer experience overall.

Implementing Pathlight to improve the customer experience

After meeting Pathlight at several different conferences, Sunbasket became excited about moving from manual reporting to automated intelligence. With the new solution, they hoped to free up time to engage in more meaningful work that didn’t require data entry. They also sought to improve agent engagement with more accessible information and get actionable insights to improve the customer experience—which is, after all, their number one priority. 

When they decided to roll out Pathlight, Sunbasket’s implementation became one of the customer service team’s fastest rollouts. They partnered with the Pathlight team to run a smooth process, including building their scorecard, getting the team on board, and learning how to report and share metrics.

When they built their scorecard, Kim could transfer over their old Salesforce template or design a new one from scratch. “I decided to start over from scratch,” she explains. “We chose to use scores out of 100 in the hopes that a greater scale would provide more information to agents.” She then met with agents to share the new scorecard and explain the different areas they’d be graded on. 

Driving engagement, visibility, and a data-driven approach to customer service

Now, Sunbasket relies on Pathlight for reporting, quality assurance, performance management, and team communication. They’ve seen several benefits since implementing Pathlight, including: 

Better agent engagement and 66% faster grading times

Using Pathlight to manage QA has sped up the entire process, helped agents better understand their scores, and encouraged them to take action to improve. Using easy-to-use and grade scorecards, Kim’s team is able to review, analyze, and grade customer interactions, and deliver focused feedback to help improve agent performance. Whereas they used to spend fifteen minutes or more grading a scorecard, Pathlight enables them to do so in just five minutes. With the ability to keep track of scores over time, Kim can also evaluate the impact of coaching and drive continuous improvement. 

“Using Pathlight QA has also improved our agents’ engagement with and understanding of the metrics they’re measured by,” says Kim. “It’s increased their agency because they’re more aware of and in control of their scores and feel empowered to make changes—and see results.” Rather than going into their 1:1s to review their scores, agents arrive with knowledge of how they’re performing and can have conversations about how to improve. Additionally, they no longer have to wait for their grades—scores are available immediately. And with the new scoring system out of 100%, there’s more room for nuance and understanding of how they’re really doing.

Building a supportive team culture

Kim, Daniel, and the team use Pathlight’s messages feature to communicate with each other. They give shout-outs to recognize agents who have done particularly well on a case, which drives visibility, boosts team morale, and creates a supportive environment.

More regular—and more empowering—one on one meetings

While customer service at Sunbasket used to run 1:1s in Salesforce, the meetings were sporadic—happening weekly, sometimes every other week, or getting canceled multiple weeks in a row if things got extremely busy. Having regular 1:1s is extremely important for team morale—and achieving performance goals—so they now use Pathlight to manage their 1:1s.

“With Pathlight, our one-on-ones are much more regular and easy to run because they’re all centralized,” says Daniel. “That’s been really great for our leads, especially, because it helps them coordinate with all of the different agents they oversee and helps them have more consistent meetings.” 

With regular 1:1s, agents are more empowered. Using Pathlight, they can prepare, add discussion topics (such as “I’d like to discuss this case, can you help me to understand where I could have improved?”), and review their scores beforehand.

60% Faster reporting cycles and more data-driven insights

Kim relies on Pathlight for reporting QA highlights every week, using graphs and data to show case types, trends over time, and other relevant information, such as time to resolution and case efficiency. She went from copying and pasting data into a word document, which was time-consuming and limited in the number of insights it provided, to automatically generating reports and saving one and a half hours per report. 

With more detailed and accessible reporting provided by Pathlight, Kim has insightful graphs and data to work with, which helps her better respond to questions from leadership about specific areas. She’s also able to more easily compare data longitudinally to understand if issues are one-off or recurring.

A newfound focus on impact—and outcomes for customers

For Daniel and Kim, who no longer have to input and process data manually, Pathlight helps them focus on more impactful projects and coaching, the latter of which has given agents a better understanding of the metrics of their success—and why they matter. 

With a greater understanding of their performance, Sunbasket agents have improved the overall customer experience. “We want to make it quick and hassle-free for our customers to get their issues resolved, and one way we can do that is by making it quick and hassle-free for our agents to know how they're doing and see their scores and performance data,” says Daniel.

The team has been on a continuous trend of improving its scores since Q1 of 2019. Daniel credits Pathlight for helping them continue upwards: “While we used to think we could only hit 95% of our goals, with Pathlight, we've consistently surpassed our customer effort score goal, increasing it by 4% over 2022, which I never thought we would be able to do,” he says.

When leaders are curious about how customer service is performing, they no longer have to open an Excel doc, Salesforce, or other tools. “Having all our data centralized saves our leadership team a lot of time when they want to take a pulse check of the organization or dive deeper if they need to,” explains Daniel. 

In the year ahead, Sunbasket hopes to see scores continue to improve while they follow economic trends and strive to cut costs wherever possible. “Pathlight will help us understand where we can improve efficiencies and customer service to drive retention,” says Daniel. “Ultimately, tools that help us understand and optimize our organization will help us cut as many costs as possible and improve outcomes for our business—and Pathlight is one of those tools.”