Slevoking.cz: Since we deployed the app, not a day has gone by without it

An unusual level of care for the people in customer service. That is how we would describe Slevoking. The company owners understand that you need to look after not only customers but employees too. We talked about how it works at Slevoking with co-owner Tomáš Čmelík and customer support manager Jan Přichystal, and we found out how Smartsupp helps them.

Can you introduce Slevoking briefly?

We are a startup founded by 2 salespeople. We built a deals portal focused on holidays and short stays. We employ 50 people, 10 of them in customer support, and 6 of those are chat agents.

Why did you pick Smartsupp chat out of the available solutions?

We saw it on plenty of other websites. We like that you are a Czech company and that the product and the support are in Czech. The visitor recordings also caught our attention. In the early days of Slevoking we often sat over a beer in the evening and watched Smartsupp recordings of how customers use our site.

Since we deployed the chat, not a single day has gone by without us using it. Originally we wanted to program our own chat, but the recordings convinced us to choose Smartsupp.

What makes chat better for you than email or the phone?

It lets us respond quickly, and customers see the chat as proof that we are a trustworthy deals portal. On top of that, people often do not want to wait a day or two for an email reply. Chat is our way of staying a step ahead of the competition.

We also treat being online on chat as a guarantee for customers. We believe that when customers see on the site that we are online, it has a positive effect on how they perceive our brand. They will trust us more when buying, because they know we are here for them.

What percentage of your customers do you serve through chat compared with email and the phone?

We have roughly two thousand chats a month and miss only 30 of them. The phone rings about five thousand times a month and we get around three thousand emails.

But communication is gradually shifting more towards chat and the number of emails is falling. We also use the option of showing visitors automatic messages when they have been on the site for more than a few minutes – on the payment page, for example, we do it after 5 minutes.

The pre-chat form, where people fill in their name and email, also helped us a lot. It reduced the number of negative messages, because the conversation stopped being anonymous.

What do you do to keep improving the level of your customer care?

Every customer care team leader is tasked with organising a company event for the customer care people every month, for example bowling or laser game. They have a company credit card with a limit and it is up to them what they use the budget on. Twice a year we also run company-wide events.

Besides that we try to come up with out of the box ideas. From time to time we give employees Prosecco and chocolate, so that they can make themselves comfortable at home and think about how our customer care could be improved.

If the way we work caught anyone's interest, we welcome capable new colleagues with enthusiasm for travel in our Prague and Brno offices. We are looking for people in roles from customer care to IT, and everyone can find the details on our careers page.