How to Reduce AHT and Increase Customer NPS in Minutes

When it comes to AHT, businesses are searching for that sweet spot between providing excellent customer service and reducing touches per task as much as possible. 

Low AHT suggests high productivity rates, which is attractive to brands. Also, in terms of customer service, faster response rates increase customer satisfaction and NPS. However, we see diminishing returns on fast service if employees need to catch up.

Heads of Customer Support at fast-growing startups want to optimize AHT as they scale. They’ve found that up to 40% of time waste occurs when finding and researching information across knowledge bases and conversations. 

To deliver snappy info discovery for every employee at your brand, read on as we dive into:

1. The benefits of swift internal search engines
2. Why knowledge search can be a major time drain
3. How Dashworks organizes information to streamline the search

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Decentralized Knowledge Drains Time & Resources

There are usually two major markers of the employee life cycle: 

1. Onboarding — Learning to do the job with loads of structured content and guidance
2. Settling down — Executing the job with the necessary knowledge, practice, and ease

As such, people tend to overlook the expanse in the middle: when new hires have sat through their 101s and 102s but still need to gain the familiarity to work at full capacity. 

Nathan Cohen, Senior Director of People & Product at Endeavor, notes that scattered institutional knowledge and a lack of quality control are major pain points that manifest particularly in unstructured onboarding flows. 

Webinars are a great way to make employee introductions, but new hires have nowhere to go for the inevitable, important part of onboarding, where they ask a thousand questions.  

Support agents are forced to re-answer the same questions dozens of times. 

This decentralization sadly results in inconsistency. 

And even the account managers working within more structured onboarding systems face roadblocks. Without the ability to tap into a centralized source of institutional knowledge, they’re essentially rebuilding the onboarding experience — over and over again. 

Information Sharing Distracts from Everyone’s Actual Jobs

Aaron Spence, Design Pickle’s Director of Culture and Talent Development, says that teams across the company waste precious time pointing out this or that resource to new hires and community members. 

They shouldn’t have to spend hours sifting through emails, Slacks, documents, reports, and issues just to answer a question or to help onboard a new hire.

The sales teams shouldn’t have to dig knee-deep in our CRMs, internal reports, emails, and docs to answer clients’ questions and close deals.

Support teams shouldn’t spend up to 30% of their time handling tickets just looking for information scattered across knowledge bases, engineering tickets, and Slacks; the customer experience we’re delivering shouldn’t have to suffer. 

All of this painstaking info-searching severely increases AHT. 

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Dashworks is Your Easy-to-Onboard Knowledge Solution 

To solve these knowledge challenges, a solution needs to be:

1. Integrated: Deeply connected across your stack — letting you find information buried across wikis, emails, events, comments, issues, tickets — everything in one place.
2. Intelligent: Helps you find what you’re looking for, even if you don’t know the exact terms to search. Results are personalized and specific so you can trust the information presented.
3. Seamless: Accessible, easy to adopt, easy to deploy, with incentives to teach and learn, and there when you need it  —  your company’s collective know-how at your fingertips.
4. Secure: Built with the highest security and privacy standards to safeguard your organization’s most important information.

“If a new hire’s at the Endeavor office with a highly structured onboarding, it’s seamless. If they’re at another location where there’s no institutional wisdom being passed on, they could get nothing.” – Nathan Cohen, Senior Director of People & Product at Endeavor

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The Benefits of Dashworks’ Internal Search

Dashworks introduces a slew of time and knowledge management improvements that ease the employee experience and ultimately benefit the customer experience. 

1. All of the Answers You Need, in One Place

Endeavor connected with Dashworks soon after we launched. As their head of product at the time, Nathan got roped in — he immediately saw the value of our company-wide search function. 

He says, “I have always hated searching platforms like Google Drive. The UX drives me bonkers, and I can never find what I want. So I was just in awe of how easy Dashworks was.” 

In terms of the actual implementation, he emphasizes its simplicity, especially compared to other SaaS tools he's had to muddle through onboarding. 

As he recalls: “It’s literally two or three clicks. And that’s it.” 

He also highlights our team’s accessibility via Slack and eagerness to make the onboarding process as smooth as possible. “That has been a super impressive and very personal touch.” 

2. Internally Organized, Pinnable Info Flows

Since kicking off with Dashworks, Design Pickle has experienced the core benefits of pared-down yet enhanced centralization, organization, sharing, and access.

Specifically, teams like marketing, people, and product — all departments with heavy file loads daily — have seen incredible benefits from our platform right out of the gate.

The interface is ideal for internally organizing and publicly posting loads of info daily.

For instance, rather than flooding Slack channels with numerous links to different platforms, PMs can create a single collection of files for the next demo day they’re pushing. 

Aaron notes, “I always searched Google Drive and forgot file names and owners or share settings. Now, I can find, share, and pin resources quickly and in context.” 

‍3. Ease of Discovery for Repetitive Searches

The accuracy of Dashworks’ search function has also enabled Nathan to discover resources that already exist and would’ve been nearly impossible to locate otherwise. 

He describes the countless times he’s thought, “I’m sure someone must have already created this deck at some point. But I have no idea where I’d start to look for it.” Even if he did, individual platforms are built for product management, biz dev, etc. – not precise search. 

As such, it’s been highly valuable to access these essential but buried files by searching Endeavor’s whole stack at once, from Notion to Asana to Salesforce and much more. 

Subsequently, Dashworks becomes a powerful onboarding tool for new hires entering the Endeavor ecosystem with zero ideas of what institutional knowledge exists for them and the ideal search function for time-saving and workflow optimization. 

“Being able to open a tab, make a search that quick, and get results that precise — it’s just mind-blowing. Everybody can tap into the Endeavor brain like this.” – Nathan Cohen, Senior Director of People & Product at Endeavor

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Why Lower AHTs = Improved NPS

Since onboarding and watching our capacities scale with time, Nathan has been floored by the efficiency, accuracy, and downstream savings driven by Dashworks’ company-wide search. Gone are the days of filtering through Slack, Google Drive, emails, etc. 

With Dashworks, he can literally just open up a new tab and quickly find what he’s looking for. 

That’s not the status quo for internal search, so doing so feels luxurious. 

In terms of Dashworks’ long-term impacts, Nathan considers how many times per day someone looks up a document, which can be extrapolated across an entire work year with 500+ Endeavor team members. 

All of a sudden, you’re saving multiple weeks — if not months — of productivity. Those little bits of efficiency go a long way.

These time-saving elements allow scaling startups to save time and improve AHT while remaining focused on the customer experience and NPS. 

Rather than cutting down on time with customers, Dashworks saves you time elsewhere.

“Dashworks gets me solutions to issues in a quick and efficient way. Instead of searching across individual apps (Jira, ServiceNow, Slack etc), I can simply open a new tab to find everything related to the issue in one place. Countless hours have been saved thanks to Dashworks.” Kalyan Oduri, Support Engineer at Armory

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