Opternative Sees a Brighter Future for Its Customers with Desk.com
Opternative, a digital provider of contact lens and glasses prescriptions, is on a mission to make eye checkups and prescriptions convenient and affordable. But as with all start-ups, there have been challenges to surmount: making sure to respond quickly to customers, managing the caseload, and building relationships with patients digitally.
For help on all these fronts, Opternative enlisted customer support provider Desk.com, which has helped it achieve better response times, first-call resolution, and product delivery and increase the ways it can interact with customers.
Opternative provides customers with an online eye exam, enabling anyone with access to a computer or a smartphone to take the exam from anywhere, at any time. Users will then receive a doctor-issued prescription, one that can be used to shop anywhere within 24 hours. The exam itself is free, with customers paying only for their prescriptions.
“Opternative was founded with the belief that everyone deserves access to current glasses and contact lens prescriptions—not only should they be accessible, but they should be affordable,” says Gerald Palmer, director of customer service at Opternative. “Anyone who wears glasses or contacts knows the pains in having to set up an appointment, go to a waiting room, the hidden fees that are usually there—an experience that in this digital age we shouldn’t have to endure anymore.”
Since adopting Desk.com’s customer support and case management solution, Opternative has cut order response times by 50 percent and seen a 30 percent increase in the number of products that customers have in hand, on time. Additionally, Opternative established a first-call resolution rate of 70 percent, with 15 hours being the average case resolution time. The company manages 400 cases each week.
“The biggest thing of value [about Desk.com] was [that it’s] a pared-down version of every other solution that we looked at,” Palmer says. “We’re a start-up; we didn’t need a huge gigantic tool—we needed something simple to get our patients in, service them, and get them out. We also needed something that was easy to learn because in the start-up world, you don’t have a lot of time to go through training. You have to be agile.”
But perhaps an even greater success isn’t as measurable. Prior to adopting the solution, the company had a simple troubleshooting system to handle questions from customers, but it lacked a way to actively build customer relationships on multiple channels. Desk.com has enabled Opternative to use multiple digital channels to interact with its customers.
“Whenever you’re in a digital healthcare setting, your greatest value is how much of a relationship you can build with a patient you never see in real life,” Palmer says. “We knew we needed something that could be multichannel, so that we weren’t only using emails or phone [to interact with our customers], but we could also interact with customers on social media. We knew we wanted to be able to use a tool that could give us filters and labels, so that we could identify unique pieces of information about each patient, and easy-to-use reporting, not something that you have to spend months training someone how to use.”
The Payoff
Since adopting Desk.com's customer support and case management solution, Opternative has:
- decreased order response times by 50 percent;
- increased the number of products that are in hand, on time, by 30 percent; and
- established a first-call resolution rate of 70 percent.