How Stuart generated $350,000 in annual cost savings with a 30% uptick in their chat volumes
Highlights
Europe’s leading last-mile delivery platform, Stuart, knows a thing or two about identifying opportunities that solve for speed, simplicity, and efficiency. With an aim to revolutionise the future of urban logistics, they built a delivery platform to connect businesses across all industries and of all sizes to high-quality independent couriers and offer on-demand and scheduled delivery solutions.
And with more than 8,000 customers spanning over 150 cities across Europe—amounting to 500,000k+ customer support tickets monthly—it needed a customer service operations strategy that truly reflected its value proposition.
About Stuart
Stuart is Europe’s leading on-demand logistics platform which connects businesses to a fleet of geolocated independent couriers. Stuart’s platform allows businesses of any kind of industry to deliver their customers with never-seen-before speed & efficiency.
At a glance
- Founded: 2015, Paris, France
- Global operations in over 150 cities across 6 countries: UK, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Italy, France
- Serves 8,000+ business clients with geolocalised independent couriers
- CRM system: Intercom (for CS-side)
- 500,000+ customer support tickets monthly; 90% chat and emails
The challenge
The company objectives for the year were presented: reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and optimise operational processes. With more than 200 customer service agents located in Bulgaria and Poland—all of whom must speak the languages they are supporting across 6 markets, including Italian and Portuguese—their current model at the time was simply not a cost-effective, scalable solution.
“The cost per hour for agents in these regions speaking Italian and Portuguese are between 18 and 48% higher in comparison to agents who speak English as a second language. Each market has different processes, which we wanted to standardise across the board to maintain consistency in how we operated globally. At that moment, an idea struck us: what if we establish a global team capable of managing requests across all markets? By doing so, we would not only decrease the cost-per-hour of agents while boosting their productivity, but we could also reduce the expenses associated with the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and have the flexibility to allocate resources as desired. This led us to the decision to implement a localisation tool.”
– Marina Alejo, Continuous Improvement Program Manager, Global Operations Stuart
The solution
After a quick benchmark of localisation capabilities from Unbabel, Lokalise, and Language IO, the Stuart team selected Unbabel as their preferred partner, due to our transparent quality and customised pricing models. They started implementation of the LangOps platform in March 2023, tackling the process in four different phases throughout their delivery logistics process.
“As the global team expanded, we experienced a growth of approximately 19% in English-speaking agents. Consequently, we were able to decrease the number of local agents by 33%. Meeting the necessity of staffing a minimum of two agents per supported language to ensure adequate coverage (12 agents per shift for 6 markets), we accomplished a reduction of $350,000 in annual expenses. This calculation incorporated the training hours and documentation involved as well, which we were able to move to all English.”
With a dedicated quality team in place, conducting weekly spot-checks of chat interactions, Stuart is able to relay any changes back to the LangOps team at Unbabel regarding glossary terminology or tone of voice to retrain the machine translation engine.
Further, to optimise the usage of Unbabel units, Stuart sought out other opportunities within the business that required content translation:
- Its Customer Support team currently uses Unbabel to translate Help Centre Articles, processes, and any other relevant documentation from EN to Stuart languages (FR, ES, PL, PT, IT)
- Its Courier Comms team now uses Unbabel to audit content across all 5 markets (besides English), ensuring compliance guidelines are adhered to
- Its Marketing team is currently testing Unbabel to translate a variety of content including blog articles, long-form content (e-books, guides, white papers, etc.), scripts, transcripts, etc.
Additionally, Stuart is considering moving to a higher quality of chats—from Realtime Base (18.5 chats per unit) to Realtime Function (4 chats per unit).
”It’s been a very positive experience, and overall our team is happy with Unbabel.”
The Unbabel effect
- $350,000 in annual cost savings
- English-speaking agents now compromise 52% of CS global team
- 33% reduction in local-speaking agent headcount
- 10% reduction of overall operations team
- Decrease in handling time from 3.5 to 2.5 minutes
- 30% increase in volume of chats handled by the global team
- 70% reduction in Guru cards, which are the knowledge base for agents, where all the processes they need to follow are stated. Now that global teams are in place to handle global requests, there is no need to create multiple Guru cards—just one for each language
Looking to expand across markets or optimize your multilingual operations with on-brand quality? Unbabel can help.
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