Alleviating the resource challenges of rapid growth – MusicMagpie

musicMagpie has been helping millions of users sell goods online since 2007. A multi-awarding, multi-category recommerce company, the brand’s rapid growth has earned recognition in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 list. Such high growth spelt strained operations, until ThinkAutomation brought relief.

Sector: Recommerce

Requirement: To increase internal efficiency and customer response times

Solution: Advanced inbound email automation, integration and resource optimisation

The challenge

musicMagpie was experiencing ever-increasing volumes of customer queries. Unfortunately, this also meant resource challenges.

The previous solution (Outlook and an Autohotkey implementation) was a temporary fix to manage workflow and emails. It provided only a basic level of structure to the customer service process. This temporary workaround was demanding on resource, due to constant maintenance needs. It was a client-side solution, so required installation across every machine in the business — which also resulted in management challenges.

This solution could not withstand the rapid pace of growth and customer contact. As the business grew, delays from a customer’s first email to receiving a response increased. musicMagpie took on additional employees to meet SLAs, but it could still take anywhere up to 1 week for customers to hear back. Employees were stretched to capacity.

The solution

musicMagpie found ThinkAutomation in their search for alleviation. The software enabled musicMagpie to centralise their disparate email inboxes into one hub. Inboxes were set up for each of musicMagpie’s different retail outlets (such as their USA website decluttr.)

From there, ThinkAutomation runs automated workflows on inbound emails. Standardised subject headers and phrases in the body text allow our software bots to parse emails into pre-set categories. Extract rules are then used to filter out important data from the emails and upload into a database, for further analysis.

This automated processing removed the need for user interaction at key operational stages. It also provided a high level of continuity across the business, and allowed the customer service department to have a more rigid and structured workflow. Plus, ThinkAutomation helps musicMagpie track and report on KPIs, something which was not possible prior to its implementation.