Further Customer Service Case Study - YouTube

My name's Hale.

I work in quality assurance for a medical device company.

I have a wife and five kids.

My name is Skylar Carlson and I'm a marine biologist.

My life involves a lot of travel,

so I'm usually home for about two weeks

and then I'm gone for two full weeks,

which requires me paying all my bills ahead of time.

I have two kids in college.

My wife, she is a stay at home mom

and she keeps the home running smoothly.

In customer service situations, I'm always responsible

for continuing to carry the ball forward.

So if someone says,

“oh I'll look into that and call you back”,

I always call them back and they've not done anything

with it.

I think with previous customer service experiences,

I don't feel like they're necessarily listening to me.

They usually don't get my problem right away.

And so I just have to wait for them to go through their

initial steps of trying to troubleshoot

and then get to where my problem is.

About four years ago I switched companies.

When I re-signed up for another HSA

with my current employer

it was a little bit of a challenge.

My biggest concern was losing track of that money.

And I couldn't figure it out.

So that's when I reached out to customer service.

When it comes to money I’m very financially aware,

especially because I have a six hundred dollar student loan

payment that I have to make every month.

So my problem came in when I participated in an incentive

to earn additional money to be spent on healthcare expenses.

I received a bonus

that was placed in an HSA equivalent account.

And I logged into the system and tried to pay all of these

vendors using that money,

and then went on a research trip

and I came back and I didn’t get the money.

Currently in the call center we have about

120 service representatives.

I know other call centers, they typically have like a certain

time frame that they need to be off the calls but

not here at Further.

Our philosophy is I think different than others.

We really take the time needed on every single call

for them to provide resolution to the inquiries.

I did work with Hale. I knew that he was really busy.

So I wanted to do as much as I could to solve it this time

and take a little bit more time to do that then not doing that

and then he would have to call in many more times.

Not everybody has time to call in.

I felt with Drew, I had a champion on my side within

Further, somebody that really was concerned about my problems,

really wanted to solve them.

I remember the day Skyler called in.

She needed to locate her money.

She was going out of town and I told her that I can try to

make calls on her behalf.

I didn't feel like I had to set aside three or four hours to

wait on hold, I knew Kashia was going to either have answers

for me or have the next steps to move forward a lot faster.

She was happy knowing that she can take care of her personal

life and I was able to take care of her medical spending

account here.

I honestly felt like I had a partner in this transaction

because she was able to stay on the phone with me while we

called other people.

When members call in I typically think of them either

like my mom, my grandma, my grandpa

so I can be compassionate.

When members call for something simple like where is my balance.

It can lead up into going deeper, going further,

helping them use the account and utilize the resources.

Having interacted with Kashia, having such a great experience,

I want to call Further to handle more routine things.

It tells me that Further really cares about their customers.

What I've found at least personally,

human connections are the most important.

If you can find a way to maintain that as much as

possible, you can open the door to understanding so many

different people more than you probably thought that you could.