Kiwi.com achieved 100% SLA success rate with Hiver

Kiwi.com is a Czech online travel agency founded by Oliver Dlouhý. They started off in 2012 as SkyPicker.com and rebranded to Kiwi.com in 2016. 

They are a technology-centered solution that helps users book flights, trains, and buses at the best prices. Presently, they are one of the five biggest online sellers of flight tickets in Europe.

Email is at the center of their operations

Meet David Pinto. He handles business development at Kiwi.com. His team works with numerous partners (airlines and travel agencies) to consolidate information on ticket availability and prices for customers — and a majority of this happens over email.

The team handles upwards of 1500 emails on a monthly basis, ranging from sourcing offers and deals that go on the website, to processing partner invoices in a timely fashion. It’s all business-critical. 

But, there was a problem.

The challenge: Handling emails was a messy affair

David’s team manages email conversations via shared email addresses (info@ and support@) where partners reach out with details of deals or requests to process invoices.

Previously, his team was using Gmail lists to route incoming emails to team members. Gmail lists came with an inherent problem: each incoming email was sent to every member’s individual inbox. Establishing who had to work on an email was backbreaking. For every incoming email, one team member literally “announced” that s/he is taking care of the email. 

To make things worse, group emails were interspersed among members’ personal emails, and sorting through them was a task. It also meant more clutter for everyone. While only one person handled each email, the remaining team members were forced to find it and delete it from their inboxes. It was slowing down the team. 

I was not happy that emails were sent to people’s personal inbox. It was irrelevant and spammy for everyone except the ones involved.

While the team struggled to stay on top of emails, David had his own share of problems:

• He had little visibility into how the workload was distributed among the team members.
• When he needed to find out what’s the status of an email, he had to ask around the team. 
• He did not have a way to measure how efficient his team was at dealing with emails.

As a result of the above inefficiencies, the team at times failed to meet the internal SLA of 24 hours while replying to partners. This was the final nail in the coffin. 

The team started looking for a more efficient way to manage their shared email addresses. And they found Hiver. 

How email management became a breeze with Hiver

With Hiver, Kiwi.com turned their email lists into Shared Inboxes. It helps team members stay on the same page about what’s going on.

And where do Hiver’s shared inboxes appear? Right inside Gmail — yet neatly separated from personal emails.

Here’s how David and his team’s lives have become easier since they started using Hiver:

The team’s efficiency has soared 

Emails can now be assigned to specific team members (without forwarding them or Cc’ing people).

Every email gets a status – Open, Pending, or Closed.

The entire team is always on the same page about who is working on what, and every email’s status.

The time they used to spend establishing who has to work on an email — or the time David used to spend finding out the status of emails — is saved now.

David is always on top of his team’s workflow

One huge problem that David faced earlier was a lack of visibility into the ownership and status of emails, and the team’s overall workflow.

With Hiver, he has complete visibility into the ownership of emails, their status, and how the workload is distributed within the team. He always knows who has the bandwidth to work on an urgent email.

I have visibility on the volume of emails, the types of issues that we’re getting. I can now ensure that the operational tasks are accomplished in a timely manner.

Automated email assignments help save time

Before Hiver, assigning emails was a tiresome process. The team used to have offline discussions about who is going to work on an email. On some occasions, to assign emails, they were forwarded to people. Distributing work was not efficient by any measure.

That has changed now. David’s team has set up rule-based automations — and partner emails are assigned to the respective account manager, with zero manual intervention.

The team does not delay sending replies to partners anymore. David and his team love automations; he says:

Automations help us allocate emails faster, and we maintain our partnerships better. It’s in fact helped us a lot with the partnerships.

Our research shows that every automation saves 2 minutes of a team’s time. The team at Kiwi.com (on average) automates 5000 actions/month — which translates into 167 hours saved every month.

100% SLA success rate

Previously, the team would sometimes delay replying to partners, despite having an internal SLA of 24 hours. Prompt communication with partners is key to nurturing the relationship with them — and delays were a step in the wrong direction.

They’ve been able to change that with Analytics. In David’s words:

I can see how much workload my team members have, their response time, and average time to close is. We never miss the SLA of 24 hours. It helps that we have an idea how well we’re serving our partners.