ID-Pal is a B2B SaaS solution that helps businesses verify the identity of customers in real-time. In a post-pandemic, fully remote world, businesses were forced to adapt to a lack of face-to-face interaction, making it difficult for certain businesses to verify the identity of their customers and provide access to sensitive information or rewards. But ID-Pal solved that problem.
ID-Pal’s software helped many companies verify their employees’ and customers’ identities remotely with speed and ease. And with Odondo’s help, they were able to maintain a great quality of customer service.
The problem: A lack of capacity during a seasonal peak
Companies who were looking to give out reward vouchers to their employees needed to verify their employees’ identity in order to redeem the reward. That’s where ID-Pal comes in — with verification software that worked 9 times out of 10, making the verification process quick and easy. However, for the rare times the software didn’t work, ID-Pal needed to verify those manually. Usually, ID-Pal’s in-house team could handle those incoming tickets.
The problem came in the run up to Christmas, when the number of verification tickets skyrocketed. During December, at its peak, they were receiving 700-800 tickets per day. It was critical that any tickets logged between 9am and 9pm were responded to within 10 minutes to avoid backlog overnight. However, ID-Pal just did not have the in-house capacity during this seasonal peak. So how did ID-Pal deal with this surge of tickets?
The solution: Outsourcing ticket requests to match demand
Simon Montgomery, COO at ID-Pal, reached out to Odondo to provide support managing IDPal’s exceptions queue. Two hours of training was provided by ID-Pal to Odondo’s skilled agents — who were specifically picked based on their past relevant experience with ID customer service. The training involved learning about the approval process and the technical elements of different IDs, and a slack channel was used to aid collaboration between the agents and ID-Pal’s team, making the process more efficient.
Odondo provided high-quality agents on-demand with no drawn-out recruitment process. The past experience of the agents meant they picked up the technicalities of the process really quickly and we could handover operations to them with little fuss. They came just at the right time — we would have been overwhelmed without them!
— Adam Smith, Business Analyst at ID-Pal
Initially, Odondo provided 1 FTE agent in November 2020, who was able to process the tickets that came through. However, the rise in tickets continued, and by 10th December, Odondo provided 4 FTEs — which further increased to 8 FTEs who were working seven days a week, from 7:30am until 10pm. The flexibility Odondo provided meant ID-Pal could request more trained agents to match demand as needed, while only ever paying for the agents’ hours that are used, rather than the spare capacity. This meant ID-Pal had support for rapid scale-up and no extra charges, all without negatively impacting the quality of service.
The results: A scalable and efficient service delivered
The rapid influx of tickets during the Christmas period had to be dealt with efficiently. With Odondo’s help, ID-Pal were able to resolve an average of 300-400 ticket requests a day during the Christmas period.
Odondo’s flexibility and ability to provide on-demand agents made a world of difference to ID-Pal — they knew that they could add and remove agents as needed, with no fixed term contract. This was critical during a peak seasonal period, and ID-Pal were able to save money by using Odondo as an extension of their in-house team, without committing to long-term costs and maintaining a high quality of service to their customers.
While we expected higher demand during the Christmas period, our existing team just wasn’t equipped to deal with the flood of tickets. Odondo allowed us to scale up with more agents as needed with no fixed term contractual commitments or additional overheads, so we’ll definitely use them again when our customer service demands rise.
