How Tonal Equipped Support Agents to Handle Complexity with Confidence

The Challenge

Helping Support Agents Find Information and Follow Processes Correctly 

Tonal’s innovative home fitness system is powerful, but its complexity presented a significant challenge for their support team.

"Troubleshooting is a beast here internally, and there are a lot of dependencies.”

- Alex Arkhipov, Care Operations, Tonal

The team, comprised of over 100 agents split between a frontline BPO partner and an in-house escalations team, grappled with intricate troubleshooting processes. Often having to navigate a maze of questions to pinpoint the customer’s actual problem. 

This complexity was compounded by their existing knowledge management system. More than 250 cumbersome workflows, housed in Salesforce, were text-heavy, often running 3-4 pages long. These documents required agents to make numerous unguided decisions, leading to inconsistencies. The internal Salesforce knowledge base itself was hard to keep organized, with poor search functionality. This made it incredibly difficult for agents, especially those at the BPO, to find the right information quickly.

"We tried to do decision trees with Salesforce, but it was unsuccessful because it took a lot of our developers' time and work.”

- Alex Arkhipov, Care Operations, Tonal

The situation came to a head when Tonal migrated to a new BPO. Workflow adherence plummeted as roughly 100 new agents struggled to locate and follow the correct procedures. Communicating real-time updates for workflow changes, product news, or urgent issues was also a hurdle. 

Tonal knew they needed a better way. They sought a solution to standardize processes and empower agents with clear, easy-to-follow decision trees, ultimately aiming to reduce escalations and improve the quality of support.

The Solution

Tonal Delivers Intuitive Guidance to Their Support Agents with Stonly

Centralized Knowledge with Interactive Decision Trees for Complex Issues

The Tonal team quickly established Stonly’s knowledge base as the source of truth for their agents—migrating over 400 internal knowledge base articles from Salesforce to Stonly. 

To tackle their most frequent and complex issues, Tonal began by creating interactive decision trees for high-volume support topics. Stonly's AI-powered search and advanced categorization also made it simple for agents to find the exact decision tree they needed, right when they needed it.

The immediate feedback from BPO agents during initial testing was overwhelmingly positive: "Why didn't we have this before?!"

AI-Powered Chat with Instant Answers

For BPO agents needing quick clarifications, Tonal implemented Stonly’s AI chat to further expedite answers and reduce reliance on internal team leads. The chat being built directly off their extensive knowledge base gave Tonal more confidence in the results.

Seamless Onboarding and Real-Time Communication

Stonly's no-code triggers also played a key role in streamlining agent onboarding and continuous learning. Tooltips, hotspots, and banners were deployed within Salesforce and other internal systems to surface relevant content exactly where and when agents needed it, saving valuable training time on new processes.

For critical, real-time updates, Tonal leveraged Stonly banners within the agents' Salesforce instances, ensuring important communications about workflow changes were seen and acted upon.

The Results

Empowered Agents, Higher Quality, and Rising CSAT

"Stonly is an integral part of our team and overall operational process,” Alex affirmed. The implementation yielded impressive and measurable improvements across Tonal’s support operations.

Key achievements include:

• Improved agent workflow adherence by 29%: The team saw an immediate spike after a soft launch in October, and this improvement continued to grow after fully sunsetting their Salesforce articles in December.
• Over 15% Uplift in QA Scores: Tonal hit their ambitious 90% QA score goal for the fiscal year by March.
• Increased Customer Satisfaction: The CSAT score specifically related to agent performance rose by a notable 6%, reflecting the higher quality of support interactions.
• Enhanced Knowledge Accessibility: The knowledge base search success rate climbed to 89%. "Before, we were not able to track successful searches in Salesforce for agents, but with Stonly’s report, we can track search words and their success rate in providing the correct resource so agents can find guides as soon as possible," Alex highlighted.

Beyond the compelling metrics, the qualitative feedback from agents has been overwhelmingly positive.

"We’ve done a few roundtables with agents, and there was no negative feedback," Alex shared. "My team of content writers have also become so self-sufficient. Their guides look professional and awesome, which advocates are happy about.”

- Alex Arkhipov, Care Operations, Tonal

Working with Stonly

A True Partnership

The Tonal team consistently praises Stonly's support. Alex highlighted Kristin, their Project Manager, for always being available, and the entire team speaks highly of the intuitive platform and seamless onboarding experience. Alex also appreciated the direct involvement of Stonly Founder, Alexis, who is always seeking feedback. "That’s not something you always see with other companies," Alex remarked.