From Frustration to Efficiency: How Automation Transformed Team By The Minute’s Customer Experience

Team By The Minute is a specialized answering service that offers highly trained on-demand receptionists to handle incoming customer service calls. Team By The Minute returns a human touch to customer service and client care with a simple by-the-minute billing structure. 

Team By The Minute exclusively serves the private insurance sector with each client being a franchisee of a single insurance company. Team By The Minute’s clients have stringent security and privacy requirements and rigorous processes to validate that data is managed in compliance with their policies. 

The private insurance industry is extremely competitive, and answering every call is critical to retaining policyholders. Team By The Minute prevents policyholders from shopping around because they get the answer they need when they need it. 

Insurance brokers pay Team By The Minute by the minutes used each month. Brokers pre-purchase bulk minutes at a reduced rate and pay a premium for any minutes used beyond the purchased package. 

In just four years, Team By The Minute established itself as its client’s top service provider. With that rapid growth, systems and infrastructure were not able to support the company’s customer load without significant manual effort. 

Brokers did not have self-serve visibility into their minute usage, remaining minutes, or other basic reporting metrics, which deteriorated trust and brand loyalty.

Team By The Minute implemented an interim solution by creating manual processes to research, collect, and report on account usage. Constant inquiries were received via phone calls and emails, and Team By The Minute needed no less than 3,840 man-hours each year to field them.  

Reporting usage to customers demanded a client portal that integrated data from the phone system (Twilio), VoIP system (NiceInContact), CRM, and customer success platform (Totango.) 

Team By The Minute understood the problem, but as non-technical leaders, they needed a trusted technology partner to develop the solution. 

“We knew we needed a portal and live tracking for data and it was quite complex. We didn’t know how to do it. We aren’t developers. We tried offshoring to a few different Indian companies, which failed each time. We were trying to find something that could work.” Zach Smith, CEO, Team By The Minute. 

Without an effective client portal, Team By The Minute would face four core challenges:

• Customer Satisfaction: Brokers were frustrated and without a portal they were left with no choice but to call customer service. Team By The Minute needed to demonstrate its partner-level commitment to the insurance companies or risk a reputation hit. Team By The Minute promises unrivaled quality, and it’s hard for customers to trust the company’s quality when their systems aren’t functioning properly. 

“This was a top priority, not a nice to have – Our competitors had already solved this problem and we weren’t willing to lose customers.” Zach Smith, CEO, Team By The Minute. 

• Competitor Pricing Pressure: Four years ago, Team By The Minute was the exclusive provider to State Farm Insurance, but since then, new competition popped up. Unlike Team By The Minute, these other providers offshore their call centers to the Philippines and Dominican Republic. This applies intense pricing pressure on Team By The Minute, which staffs its services from the United States. Every dollar spent on manual delivery that should be automated deteriorates the company’s margins.
  
• Growth/Scale: After four years, the company had grown to have nearly 800 brokers, which required four full-time employees to manage customer service requests. The business was stuck in a loop where customer growth triggered more hiring. Team By The Minute frequently changed software platforms as it scaled up, and the company needed business infrastructure that could grow with it. 

Additionally, the manual work to provide reporting was broadly disliked by employees. The roles experienced a consistent 200% turnover and demanded constant management to keep them staffed.

• Failed Offshoring Attempts Hurt Employee Engagement: Euvic was not the first provider that Team By The Minute engaged to address the client portal. The company spent 14 months struggling through contracts with two different India-based software development companies, only to find themselves empty handed.

“I wish I had found a top notch development team like Euvic from the start, and wouldn’t have wasted more than a year for nothing.” Zach Smith, CEO, Team By The Minute

In addition to the financial blow that the offshoring hiccup had caused (estimated at approximately $125k), the drawn out and unproductive collaborations damaged employee engagement. Employees working with the Indian companies were frustrated, fatigued, and sometimes hopeless. It’s difficult to quantify how that lost productivity and engagement financially impacted the business, but the cost is real. 

“A vendor like the ones we chose out of India, with low standards, sub-optimal delivery, and without accountability sends a signal to other team members that this work quality is acceptable, even if it is not.” Zach Smith, CEO, Team By The Minute. 

If Team By The Minute wasn’t able to implement an effective, secure, and integrated client portal, they would have been required to keep hiring employees to do the manual work, which would have come with a steep price. Meanwhile competitors would continue to out-serve Team By The Minute. The company would have given up competitive advantage, all while experiencing the pain of a manual process that is arduous to implement. 

Euvic was engaged to automate the reporting business processes and serve them up in a user-friendly cloud-based portal that was designed and built from scratch. The portal is called Time By The Minute.  

• Understand the Problem: The work kicked off with a workshop led by Euvic’s technical delivery team with Team By The Minute’s Head of Customer Success, CEO, and Head of Operations. Through this workshop, Euvic produced a requirements document that laid out exactly what was needed to develop the solution.
  
• Design the Solution: Euvic investigated the integration requirements with Team By The Minute’s other third-party software platforms and then delivered a solution proposal which included recommended technical architecture, wireframes and UX/UI along with design options for the graphical user interface (GUI).

• A Business Need is Transformed into a Software Solution: Euvic brought a disciplined approach to designing the solution, including requirements gathering and analysis, followed by design, development, testing, deployment, and support of the solution.

• Proactive and Effective Communication: Every two weeks, Euvic led client status calls that outlined progress for each module of the application with progress bars that visualized momentum with the project timeline. Euvic prepared story points for all the tasks, shared burn down charts, calculated velocities, and how much time was needed to launch the solution. 

Team By The Minute had spent years struggling with other providers and Euvic had the customer portal online in fewer than 4 months.

“Do you know how rare it is for a manager to look forward to a meeting with a technology vendor? My team was excited for each Euvic meeting.I could see that they were more motivated and committed to the vision after working with Euvic.” Zach Smith, CEO, Team By The Minute.   

• Capacity Building and Enduring Partnership: Once Time By The Minute was built, tested, and deployed, Euvic trained Team By The Minute’s internal IT team on using and managing the tool. This upskilled Team By The Minute’s employees and gave the company flexibility for how to engage with Euvic for long-term maintenance, if needed. 

Team By The Minute’s IT team was shown how to use the tools, collect data (exceptions, requests, response for latencies), how to check the technical data, and back trace basic problems with the applications. 

The Team By The Minute IT leaders rest easy knowing they are fully supported by the same core team at Euvic that helped to build the solution. 

“Euvic is always watching out for us. They send recommendations about updates and opportunities for enhancements simply because they care about our success. I’m grateful to have them on our side.” Leonel Aviles, IT Manager, Team By The Minute

The workshops revealed 11 core portal requirements:

• Registration with email and passcode verification (Data verified with Totango system)
• Login with Multi Factor Authentication via email.
• Add new users to account as an observer (Access to portal in read-only mode)
• Check usage and overage fees if the plan minutes limit is exceeded.
• Integration with NiceInContact VoIP system periodically to aggregate and store usage data in the system database.
• Check out historical usage and filter it by time range.
• Call Stripe API to check subscribed plan and fee for every overage minute.
• Check the billing period.
• If plan upgrade is profitable for the client the information banner shows.
• Send requests for plan change (upgrade and downgrade)
• Interactive contact support form which collects all information needed to support billing, change requests, and service questions.

Euvic needed to create an abstract layer to consume information from three systems: Totango, Stripe, and VoIP (Voice over IP) System NiceInContact. This mapped the data between the systems to establish clear connections between them and achieve all the aggregation of the data. 

Euvic suspected that some of these systems may be changed to other providers in the future, so the abstractions were designed to perform without relying on these third party vendors directly. Euvic developed an interface that offered flexibility should Team By The Minute implement a new vendor.

The fully automated solution was set up on Azure DevOps and used Azure subscriptions to create pipelines that took changes in code and built the client and server back-end applications. The applications were pushed into production environments or two defined testing environments.

Test plants on DevOps were used to define test cases for QA. Test cases were designed to be used during user acceptance testing, and they had all the information needed to pass through the tests, including login data, the time range to set to get data and what the data should look like so the solution could be easily tested. 

Testing revealed a use case that wasn’t discussed during the workshops and requirements gathering phase, which was that in rare cases, Team By The Minute negotiated custom pricing plans that would not fall into the broader mapping exercise between Stripe and the other systems. Thanks to the quality testing protocols and processes, this use case was addressed and customers enjoyed a seamless experience once the portal was launched.

“Trust is what sold me on Euvic.” Zach Smith, CEO, Team By The Minute

Euvic was chosen because the team established instant accountability and credibility. Team By The Minute was responsible for understanding their problem and desired outcomes while Euvic took the lead on designing and developing the technical solution. The Team By The Minute leadership team particularly appreciated the direct, no-nonsense approach that Euvic’s technology team brings to meetings. 

At every step of the process, Euvic’s project team clearly and succinctly explained the rationale for solutions and the implications of decisions as they relate to business goals. 

“The meetings start on time, focus on exactly what is needed, and deliver an inspiring degree of efficiency.” Raldy Fuentes, Operations Manager, Team By The Minute. 

The team on this project included project management, front- and back-end development, and quality assurance. The team was led by Karol, Technical Team Lead.  

Karol, based in Poland. As Project leader, Karol is responsible for direct contact with the client, gathering and analyzing requirements, leading workshops, designing the solution, leading the team, and operational work. Karol has been with Euvic since 2015.

Paulina, based in Poland. A versatile developer who began her journey as a backend developer and now specializes in React technologies and trending practices that enhance UI and UX. Paulina has been with Euvic since 2017.  

Sebastian, based in Poland. A programmer specializing in backend solutions, often in .NET technology using Docker. His experience and knowledge of design patterns and best practices have allowed Sebastian to quickly create a high-quality solution. Sebastian has been with Euvic since 2014.

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, Team By The Minute’s leaders have a strong grasp on business strategy but are not deeply experienced in software development. This collaboration demonstrated the alchemy of two strong teams who know their domains. 

By delivering a highly effective and integrated customer portal in just four months, Euvic liberated the Team By The Minute executives to focus on business growth and differentiation. 

Key results include: 

• 83% Drop in Customer Calls: Customer calls dropped by 83% in the first quarter after the new client portal was launched, indicating a massive uplift in customer satisfaction. In addition to Team By The Minute, Euvic developed a simple system for customers to purchase additional minutes, change plans, and see usage reporting, all of which further increased client loyalty and satisfaction.
  
• $110,000 in Annual Savings Drives Competitor Pricing Pressure: Now the client portal is managed by a single junior-level IT person. The portal reduces expenses for Team By The Minute by more than $110,000 per year – easily paying for itself and enabling Team By The Minute to extend those savings to customers, addressing pricing pressure without compromising profit.
  
• Up to 3x Growth/Scale: By automating manual work, Team By The Minute’s leadership could shift its sights to growth, targeting 3x growth and scalability. Euvic is now a growth partner, helping the company to strategize ways that technology can enable expansion. The platform is future-ready, and can easily be updated to adopt advanced features, reporting, and AI.
  
• Improved Employee Engagement: Team By The Minute transferred employees from the tedious work of manual reporting to other more engaging and impactful roles. After working with an exceptional technology partner, Team By The Minute managers feel more informed and empowered than they used to.

Euvic’s entrepreneurial spirit is an asset to Team By The Minute since the Euvic team considers the end-to-end business implications of any technology solution, and builds for the future.