Overview
Veho is in a hyper growth phase as they scale their operations from 15 to 40 metro areas and grow their support team, their development team, and raise $170 Million in their Series B round.
In 6 months, Veho had a new messaging system for customer and driver support built in Twilio Flex – they call it Veho Dispatch. It’s a central support messaging system that helps them manage incoming message growth, increase customer trust and reliability, and reduce resolution time. Codingscape completed all this work for the equivalent cost of 3 full-time employees for Veho.
Background
Veho is a last-mile package delivery service that connects large national retail clients with local gig workers who use their own vehicles to transport packages from a warehouse to end customers. They’re a $1.5 billion company and expanded from 15 to 40 new markets in 2022.
Most of Veho’s clients are large national companies that contract with companies like Veho to fulfill tens of thousands of orders each week, many of which are for perishable goods like meal kits, to customers in cities all over the country. Veho’s high customer satisfaction scores are instrumental in their ability to attract and retain clients and act as an important differentiator in an increasingly competitive market.
Problem
Veho support teams were using a home-grown messaging solution that couldn’t keep up with company growth. didn’t have enough engineering resources to migrate to a new messaging solution and build their growth projects at the same time. They searched for a software development consultancy who could do the job and partnered with Codingscape.
These were Veho’s main goals:
- Manage the growing message volume that will accompany planned launches in 40 new markets in 2022
- Increase customer trust and reliability by sending and receiving SMS using a 5-digit shortcode
- Reduce resolution time by implementing automated routing and responses
Solution
Codingscape recommended a 6-month engagement to migrate the support teams to the Twilio Flex platform, followed by an ongoing engagement to support the changing needs of Veho’s support and development teams.
We were able to configure and enhance Twilio Flex as needed. However, Flex was tightly integrated with other Veho systems (e.g., databases, APIs, customer and driver management tools, etc.). That meant the migration needed more backend support and since Veho’s development team was focused on growth projects, Codingscape added a senior full-stack engineer and tech support specialist to the agile team.
Defining a stable test environment was a big challenge in the project. Before Veho Dispatch, Veho’s support teams responded to incoming SMS from customers and incoming chats from drivers via their driver app. They also use Google SSO to access Twilio Flex from their own personal laptops from their homes, and they employ various browser plug-ins.
We set up 2 Flex testing environments to account for the variety of devices, operating systems, broadband connections, and browsers. In addition to the development work, Codingscape also introduced new product and project management processes, including:
- Stakeholder Discovery and Use Case Documentation
- Product Roadmap and Project Prioritization
- Product Testing, Launch and User Training
- Tech Support and Resolution
- Remote Collaboration with Support and Dev teams
- CI/CD and Disaster Recovery
In 6 months, Veho had a new messaging system for customer and driver support built in Twilio Flex – they call it Veho Dispatch. It’s a central support messaging system that helps them manage incoming message growth, increase customer trust and reliability, and reduce resolution time. Codingscape completed all this work for the equivalent cost of 3 full-time employees for Veho.
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Engagement Details
Team Composition
- Product Manager
- Senior Developer with deep Twilio Flex expertise
- Senior Fullstack Engineer
- Tech Support
Duration
- Twilio Flex migration – 6 months (June 2021 – Nov. 2021)
- Ongoing development support 7 months+
Project Stats
- 4-person agile team
- Migration to Twilio Flex complete in 6 months
- Scaled customer support capacity to handle launch in 40 new markets
- Increased customer trust and reliability with SMS shortcode feature
- Helped scale Veho development team
- Migrate development team from monolithic database to a set of microservices
Product & Project Management
- Stakeholder discovery and use case documentation
- Product roadmap and project prioritization
- Product testing, launch, and user Training
- Tech support and resolution
- Remote collaboration with support and dev teams
- CI/CD and disaster recovery
Where are we now
After that, the Codingscape team entered into an ongoing phase while Veho restructured and grew their customer support team to manage 40 market launches in 2022. Codingscape also helped the Veho development team migrate from a monolithic database to a set of microservices that will help them scale their development team.
Sources
Technologies
Backend
- MongoDB
- DynamoDV
UI
- React
- Javascript and Typescript
Deployment and Hosting
- Github Actions
- Circle CI
- AWS
Integrations
- Twilio Flex