Whether you’re an international or a UK business, having a prime London address to represent your company is a great way for a small business to improve credibility. However, office space in central London is extremely expensive.
The Hoxton Mix offers a suite of business solutions, that help businesses anywhere to have a presence in London, without actually being in London. It's Virtual Office solutions provide startups with a London address, a mail-forwarding service, and a virtual receptionist.
Majority of The Hoxton Mix customers are based in the UK but they also support many companies from the U.S. to easily establish their EU operations.
We had a virtual coffee with Chris Sees, Co-founder and CEO of The Hoxton Mix, to learn how Groove has helped his team improve their efficiency and save on average 80 hours of their time per month.
Life before Groove: No central hub for managing communication
Before Groove, the team at The Hoxton Mix was using Gmail to communicate with their customers. “It was a mess! Key information was held in people’s private Gmail accounts. If someone got sick or was on vacation we couldn’t follow up with the customers. I remember receiving calls from customers asking why they are not getting a response from person X.” says Chris.
According to Chris, their emails were all over the place since there was no central hub to manage the messages. Another issue was with assigning tickets. The Hoxton Mix tried to do assigning via forwarding in Gmail but then emails would land in personal inboxes instead of team aliases. They also didn’t have a good way of dealing with repeat questions.
When Chris started hiring service agents, he realized that he needed the ability to review their performance and to easily identify potential areas for improvements. Chris looked into different ticketing systems. He found out about Groove via a comment on Hacker News, where another user was recommending the platform. Chris trusted the Hacker News community so he decided to give Groove a try.
"More often than not, customer inquiries involve questions which we have answered before or to which answers can be found on our website. The ability to use Groove's bot to resolve these tickets clears the queue for customers with more complex questions. As a result, our staff can devote more time to the questions that truly require personal assistance,"
Chris Sees · CEO and Co-Founder @ The Hoxton Mix
Life with Groove: 80 hours of time saved each month
When choosing the right ticketing system, the following aspects were important to Chris and his team:
- Price
- Ability to make the tool work seamlessly with Google Apps
- Ease of use
- Integration with Facebook
- Automation
- Reporting
They went through trials of different help desk software and The Hoxton Mix’s team immediately fell in love with the snooze functionality, the fact that they were able to keep all the communication in one place via integrations, and that everything worked so smoothly on Groove. The added bonus was Groove’s competitive price when compared to Zendesk.
After deploying Groove, The Hoxton Mix started with automating some of their work with the help of auto-responses and instant replies. “We get asked the same sort of questions over and over again and having auto-replies based on keywords is amazing! If we get a new question we create an auto-response,” says Chris. The Hoxton Mix team would also turn repeat questions into Knowledge Base articles to make it easier for their customers to quickly find the answer they are looking for. “KB has been invaluable to us. Our users can easily find answers to many questions without needing to wait for a response from us,” says Chris.
The Hoxton Mix team estimated that through using Groove, they were able to save 80 hours of their time per month, which was previously wasted on repeat tasks, searching for emails, and solving workflow issues.
Their favorite Groove features
We asked Chris what were his top 3 favorite Groove features. Here is what he said:
- Notes: “I like that if agents have questions they can add notes. This allows us to collaborate on Groove almost like on a silent chat.”
- Auto-responses and instant replies: “We get asked the same sort of questions over and over again and having auto-replies based on the keywords is amazing! If we get a new question we create an auto-response. “
- Rules: “If we get a billing related question from suppliers we have rules that automatically assigns them to different people based on their role.”
