Learn how Brastel set up 20 workflows and reduced handling time per ticket by up to 39%.
Brastel team saves 8 minutes handling each ticket for Brastel Remit. It's a 35% decrease in the ticket resolution process.
Brastel team saves 12 minutes handling each ticket for Telecom. It's a 39% decrease in the ticket resolution process.
Brastel team handles nearly 2,000 tickets a month using automation.
Brastel is a Tokyo-based telecommunications company that has been in business for 25 years. It has multiple branches throughout Japan, as well as overseas. Brastel provides services to both businesses and individuals, and specializes in:
Wanting to cover these areas more comprehensively, they created separate brands to ensure the highest quality of service:
Brastel takes extraordinary care of their customers' comfort. As proof, these same 40 hardworking agents provide support in 11 languages for My 050 and 12 languages for Brastel Remit. By assisting in the customer’s native language, the company can inspire trust and make the relationship more long-lasting.
Initially, the company provided support through a call center, but this was no longer enough as the internet exploded in popularity. Customers wanted to stay in touch through communication channels other than traditional phone calls.
So, the Brastel team drilled down into customer preferences and discovered that, for example, the Thai community communicates via Line, while the Chinese tend to use chats, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. They knew for a fact that customers could dictate the company's focus, so they had to be quick on their feet and organize all support communications anew.
Brastel started experimenting with various communication channels, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, and other social media, just to be more approachable. As a result, their support agents made a major shift and added customers' favorite social media channels to their synchronous communication toolkit. And that's where the real struggle began.
Employees had to switch between tabs and multiple browser windows to be here and now for their customers. They had to be very proactive and careful not to miss any of the messages that were popping up minute by minute. One can only imagine the hustle and bustle they experienced at the time. Enough was enough, and eventually, our customer service products came into play.
First, Brastel opted for LiveChat to handle synchronous customer communications. They combined all the social media channels they used daily into a single interface to facilitate real-time message management.
Next, they applied KnowledgeBase for internal use to effectively gather the team's knowledge. With KnowledgeBase in place, the support team wrote help center articles or created useful FAQs. Over time, agents noticed that some resources could be helpful for customers as well, so they used the collected information and made some articles public. From then on, they were able to keep the entire team and customers up to date because everything was in one easy-to-manage place.
Everything seemed to work flawlessly, but support agents claimed that asynchronous communication and emails were areas that needed a closer look. This was mainly because any unresolved chat became a ticket, and the ticket form offered in LiveChat wasn't sufficient for Brastel. Unfortunately, they couldn't customize the email template, add their own domain, work on a ticket as a team, or create handy ticket groups.
In order to comply with Japanese privacy and customer identification laws, when you want to transfer money, you must present a valid document to prove your identity. If it's not valid, the money transaction will get stuck. This was a very inconvenient and repetitive issue for Brastel's customer service team. They contacted each customer and instructed them personally, which took time and effort.
Prior to HelpDesk, Brastel Remit's customer case management process included:
The entire process took agents up to 25 minutes per ticket. Given that the company receives more than 100 tickets per day, this was a burden for the 20-person team.
Another serious concern was the handling of 050 numbers for Telecom. Many customers wanted to get this number and were applying for it at the same time. The inbox started to be jammed with a high volume of messages, and unfortunately, the Brastel team couldn’t respond as quickly as they would have liked. As a result, customers didn’t know whether the support staff was already addressing their cases or not.
Of course, these delays weren’t intentional and were purely due to limited time and task prioritization. However, customers didn’t necessarily accept this as an explanation. So the Brastel team had to change their work approach to keep customers happy in the long run.
Before HelpDesk, the case management process for Telecom consisted of similar customer identity validation steps as Brastel Remit’s services. However, the turnaround time was vastly different: It took the team up to 33 minutes per ticket to resolve a single customer issue.
With all these time-consuming issues in mind, Irina Bokareva and Dalton Hasegawa, managers at Brastel, decided to make another power move to relieve their team and chose HelpDesk to enhance the ticket handling process.
Originally, the Brastel team started using HelpDesk only for internal procedures and team leadership, but later, they incorporated HelpDesk into customer relationship management. Brastel managers had to be very strategic and prepare the HelpDesk account for external outreach and handling multiple customer requests at once.
First, they added a custom domain to tailor the reply address and increase message credibility. In addition, Brastel managers defined priority and status levels based on the existing ticket handling flow so everyone on the team could follow the same rules. Up next, the Brastel technical team got creative and used HelpDesk API documentation to develop custom webhooks to meet the company’s goals.
The Brastel team customized the footers, email message template, and website contact form to fully express themselves.
Customizing your email is very important because, during a face-to-face conversation, your body language can say it all. When you send a message in HelpDesk, you can give it a structure and format that aligns with your intentions and brand.
Irina Bokareva, Marketing Project Manager at Brastel Co., Ltd.
Also, support agents use screen recording to provide direct video guidance to customers. Less typing and more showing is a smart approach when things are urgent. They can also copy images straight into the message without saving them to the device first.
Brastel highly values organized teamwork. They use the helpful ticket following feature to stay on top of things when the customer case needs extra attention or assistance from a more experienced person.
Agents also start their workday by checking out the shared views created for the entire support team by managers Bokareva and Hasegawa.
The support team already knows what’s on their to-do list with just one look. This creates a calm and orderly work culture and puts people at ease.
HelpDesk embraces everything we needed when it comes to asynchronous customer communication.
Irina Bokareva, Marketing Project Manager at Brastel Co., Ltd.
In addition, HelpDesk opened up a whole new way of working — an automated one. Since the company has two leading brands, namely Brastel Remit and Brastel Telecom, and two different customer groups, they had to manage customer identity validation processes independently and simultaneously.
The Brastel Remit team set up more than 20 workflows to proactively communicate with customers and effectively manage the identity validation process. Since the company delivers remittance services to customers in 12 languages, the HelpDesk team created bespoke language tag variables. This enables automated responses to customers in their native language.
Now, let’s browse through the four main workflows that are the real timesavers for the Brastel Remit team.
The Brastel team used a combination of tags and available statuses to send language-specific autoreply messages to customers, confirming that the support agent would soon address their case. In this way, the workflow acts as a first line of support, so to speak, as it sends the first messages to customers and assures them that help is coming.
Before HelpDesk, support staff had to manually ask customers if they still had any questions, especially if they had been inactive for several days. Needless to say, agents had a lot on their plate anyway. Now, Brastel takes the lead and automatically asks follow-up questions to ensure both sides of the conversation are on the same page.
Brastel managers set up a workflow in HelpDesk, so support agents don’t have to go through the inbox every day looking for unanswered customer messages. Instead, they move to another customer waiting in the queue and leave that task to automation.
The idea is simple: the workflow automatically sends a follow-up message when a customer hasn’t responded to the last message within three days. Also, this particular workflow always adds a pre-defined tag to the customer ticket, making it easy to filter these cases and create shared views in the next step.
We create workflows based on the results in the reports. This way, we save a considerable amount of time. Workflows are very clear for me as a leader to manage my team in an efficient way.
Irina Bokareva, Marketing Project Manager at Brastel Co., Ltd.
Brastel managers — Irina and Dalton — used the follow-up email templates provided by Learning Space to save time and adopt customer communication best practices.
With Learning Space, a space created for education, you can learn the best approaches. We studied these templates, and they were amazing and helpful. We were able to use these templates and create emails almost without any help from the HelpDesk team.
Irina Bokareva, Marketing Project Manager at Brastel Co., Ltd.
The Brastel team receives hundreds of customer messages a day, and it was difficult to identify those that required immediate attention, such as messages for instant money transfers. So they set up another workflow to detect pressing tickets and give them a “High” or “Urgent” priority without any effort.
First, Brastel managers instructed call center employees to create tickets for customers who contact them directly and enter the relevant priority level straight in the email subject line. Then, they set up a workflow that identifies the priority level entered in the email subject line and automatically reprioritized tickets in HelpDesk. As a result, the entire customer ID validation team can simply glance at the ticket priority icons and get to work.
The visual elements in HelpDesk are great for working efficiently. The 'High' and 'Urgent' priority icons are ideal for collaboration — we can quickly go through multiple tickets by just glancing at them.
Dalton Hasegawa, Manager at Brastel Co., Ltd.
The Brastel managers also created a workflow to add tags of their choice to customer tickets effortlessly. This really streamlines ticket filtering and report browsing. Of course, to set up this automation, the Brastel team first had to think about the most common customer cases and then create a list of custom tags. It took work, but the results and time savings speak for themselves.
The automation case for the Telecom brand is slightly different. Automating the issuance of 050 numbers is a tough nut to crack because each day brings a new customer use case, making it difficult to turn the process into a workflow. In this scenario, the company relies on a set of canned responses.
The customer service team creates several smart canned responses every day and audits them regularly to ensure they always match the customer’s intents. Such ready-made messages streamline the issuance of 050 numbers and allow the support staff to reuse the knowledge gained by the entire team.
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Bokareva and Hasegawa measure their team performance based on uptime, and since the support agents handle tickets with workflows and ready-to-use canned responses, the results are outstanding!
For Brastel Remit, the team cut the time to resolve customer tickets from 23 minutes to 15 minutes — this translates to a 35% decrease in the ticket resolution process for this brand.
Before HelpDesk
After HelpDesk
Telecom has also experienced tremendous success. The customer service team reduced the response time from 31 minutes to 19 minutes. This means a 39% reduction in the ticket resolution process for this brand.
Before HelpDesk
After HelpDesk
Before Brastel decided on HelpDesk, the support team worked on the most complex customer cases in a shared spreadsheet. Sometimes there were a lot of new customer questions, which created pressure to act here and now. People were stressed every time they had to do something in that document.
Today, the customer service team at Brastel handles nearly 2,000 tickets a month using automation, and employees and customers collectively feel the difference.
With HelpDesk, people on the team approach their work calmly, and customers get faster responses, even though the process can be complex. Each agent can spend more time resolving tickets and make our customers happier with an individual approach and better response time.
Dalton Hasegawa, Manager at Brastel Co., Ltd.
Brastel’s success story shows how they’ve cut down on routine procedures — no more searching for emails and digging around the inbox. The process of handling tickets is transparent and done through a single dashboard. With workflows, the Brastel team can truly maintain the highest customer communication standards and handle more and more tickets at once.
Weronika Masternak
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