With a growing global customer experience team, Freshly’s leadership sought ways to scale an inefficient employee recognition program and tie it closer to business results.

Freshly is one of the fastest-growing food-tech startups and the largest fresh prepared meal delivery service in the country. In 2019, Freshly expanded its production facilities and scaled up delivery coverage to all 48 contiguous U.S. states.

Their secret to keeping customers happy during all of this growth? A happy and engaged customer experience team.

“Internally building morale and recognizing great performance is really important to us,” says Megan Merrick, Freshly’s Online Engagement Manager. “We wanted associates to be able to feel like they could connect with teammates across different time zones and different shifts.”

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The Challenge

Freshly’s leadership team was manually fielding staff recognition and awarding bonuses in employees’ paychecks. It would often take weeks for employees to see the impact of their great work in their take-home pay.

Numerous studies have detailed the importance of recognition that is frequent, public, and meaningful. While Freshly’s process might have worked in the early days, it became increasingly clear that they now needed a better way to engage their growing customer experience team and inspire them to meet performance goals.

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The Solution

To achieve their goals, Freshly turned to Cooleaf’s integration with Zendesk to reward a blend of key performance indicator (KPI) achievements on a weekly basis. Through Cooleaf’s platform, Freshly was able to set KPI targets for the points-based incentives for top performers across metrics like chat response time, call wrap-up time, email response time, and more.

In addition to KPI-driven points incentives, Freshly could now empower managers and peers to recognize great performance publicly in real-time. Freshly was also able to bring their global, virtual team together through unique team challenges that adressed personal and professional goals.

Onboarding Cooleaf was easy. In less than 30 days, Freshly was able to roll out an engagement strategy that combined peer-to-peer recognition, performance incentives, spot bonuses, and virtual team challenges.

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The Results

For the leadership team, the Cooleaf platform simplified the process of keeping employees engaged. Once the platform was up and running, Cooleaf took over many of the tasks that were previously performed manually. The top performers received automatic recognition on a weekly schedule, and reward fulfillment was fully automated and managed through Cooleaf platform.

Dan Medina, Director of Customer Experience at Freshly, ascribes Cooleaf’s popularity at Freshly to its ease of use. “It’s a cool-looking platform that is easy for anyone to use. Our associates loved logging in every day to see new recognitions and congratulate their peers. They took pride in the praise they received because the recognitions were posted publicly in the main feed.” The platform was also integrated with Slack, a tool that many employees were already using to communicate and collaborate.

Not only is Freshly’s customer experience team more engaged, they’ve also seen real business results. Within 90 days of launching Cooleaf, Freshly witnessed a decrease in key customer response time metrics and improved employee engagement, morale, and attrition. As Megan observes, “Cooleaf really exceeded our expectations in a very short time.”