Highlights
Dee is a browser-based chatbot designed for revital U to scale customer service capacity amid rapid company growth. Dee drove significant cost savings, more customer engagement, and increased overall customer satisfaction.
Key Challenges
As their company rapidly grew, revital U struggled to scale their customer service resources, while keeping costs in check. More customers meant more questions, and their support team found their time dominated by answering the same questions over and over.
Their customers were also frustrated with the ticketing system used by the customer service department to log questions and issues; responses were slow and answers were often incomplete.
In short, revital U needed to:
- Remove barriers between customers and getting quick answers (e.g. not all web visitors were submitting a ticket to get help)
- Reduce the ever-growing workload for revital U customer support staff (e.g. the support staff was spending significant time answering the same questions over and over again).
The Solution
Revital U partnered with Mobile Coach to create an automated customer service agent with the goal to decrease support tickets and call center minutes. The chatbot, Dee, was programmed to answer users’ questions and create support tickets only when needed.
Instead of every question routing through a customer service team with limited time and resources, the chatbot could act as a tireless, enthusiastic support team member working around the clock to provide answers and only bring in a customer service agent when necessary.
Designed to remove barriers
Dee was designed specifically to remove barriers between revital U’s customers and the answers they sought. Because they put answers at the user’s fingertips, chatbots are an ideal way to reduce communication friction. To leverage this feature for a customer service chatbot, you need to put your chatbot where customers look for questions.
When a revital U customer has a question, their first stop is the support webpage—so Dee lives in a web widget on that support page. Since its launch, 48% of support page visitors have used Dee.
After determining where Dee needed to be, the next design challenge was to make sure it was easier to get an answer through the chatbot than by calling customer service or creating a support ticket. To accomplish this, we created a menu with the questions customers repeatedly asked the customer service team.
Instead of getting on the phone or writing up a long ticket, users could simply click on their question in the menu and get an immediate answer. To ensure that the user experience was frictionless as possible, the following design features were also added:
- After Dee responds to a question, it sends a follow-up message like this so the customer knows what to do if their question wasn’t answered completely or they need more help.
- Dee is integrated with revital U’s ticketing system so customers never have to ask the same question through multiple channels.
- There is a clear escalation path to a live customer support agent.
- Customers can type their own question if they don’t want to navigate the menu.
Reduced workload
From Dee’s launch, customers have preferred the new communication method and found it easier to navigate than the ticketing system. Customers submitted over five times more inquiries than before the chatbot was launched, demonstrating how the frictionless nature of chatbots drives user engagement.
Instead of needing a customer service agent to answer and process each customer request, Dee now handles the first level support. When a user asks Dee a question, Dee processes the request and gives answers, points to resources, or creates a support ticket as needed.
If Dee doesn’t have the answer to a question it contacts customer support who can reply directly to users through Dee using the Mobile Coach Platform. Call center minutes have decreased by 15% even while the company’s revenue grew by 22%.
Summary
Chatbots like Dee solve the age old question of how to scale customer service without expanding the customer service team. We watched revital U grow their business without having to hire a single additional representative, and, in fact, freeing their reps up to spend more time handling only the most complicated customer questions.
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