PawBoost’s team has been reconnecting pet owners with their lost pets for nearly a decade. However, they were experiencing some difficulties keeping up with 24/7 demand without hiring to scale up operations.
They reached out to Stakwork to help automate their workflows and streamline the photo approval process, so more pet owners can reach a wider network in their local communities. Here’s their story:
About PawBoost
PawBoost is a thirteen-person company that offers a self-service advertising platform for individuals who have lost a pet.
PawBoost is essentially an “Amber Alert” for lost pets. Instead of putting up fliers, PawBoost uses geo-targeted social ads to help users locate their lost pets. The service is faster and more effective than flyering, and thousands of pets have found their way home as a result.
Though the platform is mostly self-service, each ad requires a quality assurance (QA) review to make sure that images are clear, spam is filtered out, and terms of service are met. But PawBoost didn’t have the resources or staff to handle manual reviews outside business hours which led to a loss of potential revenue.
Challenges faced in agile scale up
PawBoost encountered a common roadblock that many companies face when scaling up: How do you go from operating during regular hours to 24/7/365 coverage without hiring a lot of people?
Every PawBoost lost pet ad needs to be QA’ed to ensure that images are uploaded in a high enough resolution to be useful, and to make sure that no one is using the service to spam users with inappropriate content.
Posts with content that doesn’t meet terms of service are very rare, but they can have huge consequences if not detected and blocked. PawBoost relies on its social media platforms to distribute missing pet information, and those accounts can be shut down or suspended if inappropriate content is posted. However, PawBoost’s demand isn’t currently predictable enough to warrant expanding its customer service team to cover all hours of the night.
“There’s a point where using technical resources levels off, and we were running out of automation techniques to take care of the problem.”
Tim Kijewski, Co-CEO at PawBoost
PawBoost couldn’t automate its process entirely, because human judgment was needed to make sure the images were appropriate. So the PawBoost team asked: How can AI and humans work together to get more approvals done?
Here’s what PawBoost had to achieve:
- Expand its ability to review ads 24/7 without growing the service team.
- Expedite QA turnaround time to improve customer experience.
- Increase sales by expanding available hours, and close a lost-sales gap created by limited hours (estimated to be up to 15% of visitors).
The solution: AI and human collaboration
Stakwork worked with PawBoost to identify the resources needed to implement an agile scale up and design an automation workflow to bring it to life.
To start, a member of the Stakwork team consulted with PawBoost to understand their process and needs. This involved getting a detailed understanding of the two important steps in the process:
- Identify if the photo is appropriate – Does the image feature a pet? Does it meet all of the requirements for social platforms?
- Crop the photo – In some instances, people upload photos of their pets that contain unnecessary background or people. These photos need to be cropped in order to make them more effective for advertising.
Stakwork built a custom solution that would allow PawBoost to QA and automatically approve lost pet ads outside of normal business hours using AI and human collaboration.
Stak workflow showing the steps to complete QA
Images that meet rigorous posting standards could be processed without human oversight using AI image processing, allowing PawBoost to approve posts in near real-time.
Images that didn’t meet the requirements for automated approval would be flagged and outsourced to human content control associates for a final QA check. Combining human interaction with AI allows PawBoost to move quickly with reduced risk of exploitation by spammers.
Less work, more approvals
PawBoost has been using Stakwork’s automation solution for over six months, and currently processes between 300 and 400 jobs per day. So far, they’ve approved about 900,000 jobs.
In that time, PawBoost has seen turnaround time reduced from hours to minutes – currently, images are processed in less than a minute on average.
In addition, Stakwork also helped PawBoost to streamline processes internally to expedite manual work. Before Stakwork’s reboot, staff members wouldn’t receive notifications to check and approve images. They had to regularly look for new jobs in the workflow, which led many to feel like they had to “be on” all the time. Thanks to Stakwork, employees receive timely updates on pending jobs on an as-needed basis, allowing them to focus on other important tasks.
“Stakwork helped us alleviate stress…It helped us clean up the loose ends of our process and allowed us to put a process in where there was none, and for an operation that was hard to process.”
Tim Kijewski, Co-CEO at PawBoost
Meet Stakwork
We are Stakwork, and we’re here to transform the way work gets done. Our crowdworking platform, Stak, combines the power of AI and human collaboration for scalable business process automation.
If you’re interested in a custom solution for your complex, repetitive work, we’re ready to help you fill the gap with an always-growing, always-learning ecosystem of global knowledge workers who are ready to work right now.
Request a Stak demo. Contact us.