AI in Action: How to Create a Team of Super Agents

Zowie’s Product Manager Jeremi Jak and Bella Bourne, Senior Operations Manager at Carv, share how impactful AI software can be in transforming your customer service in our AI in Action: How to Create a Team of Super Agents webinar, jointly run with Unbabel.

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Introductory Transcript
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[00:00:02] I would say that my job is well done when customers get their answers twice as fast, agents are happier, employee retention increases for internal teams, and customer satisfaction is growing. Zowie, of course, is a company that’s a customer service automation platform for mostly e-commerce companies, but we do work with other segments as well. I'll be speaking more broadly about Zowie in a second. So yeah, really happy and excited to be here and over to you Evelyn. Yeah. No, thank you. It's great to have you and Bella Bourne. Would you like to introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about your company? 

[00:00:56] Hi everyone. My name is Bella. Sorry, you might be able to tell from my voice, I am currently recovering from quite a bad virus and I've just about got my voice back, but I was really keen to still be able to join this discussion. This is something I spent a lot of time thinking about  in my work, but I apologize in advance for any croaking or coughing. So I work at Motion Metrics, a sports technology startup/scaleup specifically on the product Carv, which is a digital ski coach 

[00:01:25] A ski wearable with hardware that goes into your ski boot that measures certain performance metrics and those get run through our system to analyze level of skiing and the user then receives a personalized coaching experience with real time audio feedback. Yeah. I've been a cop for just over four years and my main focus and source of pride has been the building and growing of the customer experience and customer success team here at Carv. 

[00:01:53] Amazing. Thank you. And thank you for doing this when you're under the weather appreciate that. Last but definitely not least, Mike. Would you like to introduce yourself? Well, thanks Evelyn. Yeah, proud to be here. Thanks for the invite. I'm excited to be talking about artificial intelligence. It seems to be all anyone talks about at the moment. So I'm the Customer Experience Manager at Springer Nature. Springer Nature is what you might term a traditional publishing company. 

[00:02:23] We've been around for 170+ years and we’re responsible for many of the world's most respected scientific publications including Nature, which is read by thousands of people every week around the world involved in science. So really our aims are to publish research that helps sort of advance things that are problematic in the world. We had a pretty exciting time during COVID-19. 

[00:02:53] We published an awful lot of research about covid when that happened. So kind of proud of the part we played in that I've been with Springer Nature just over eight years. My focus is very much on measuring and improving the customer experience - when I joined we weren't measuring it at all. Now you could argue we’re measuring it too much but we looking at that and how we improve it and I think key to that is employee experience as well. So which we’ll come onto I’m sure. 

[00:03:23] Amazing. Great. I'm yeah really pleased to have you all just before we do dive into the questions, everyone. We just wanted to just set the scene a little bit in terms of what customer support does look like today and AI’s role within it. Jeremi, I do know that there's a couple of slides if you would just like to talk to these for us. Of course, gladly. So,  at Zowie which is customer service automation for ecommerce companies. 

[00:03:53] We work for years now with different companies and different teams within those companies around improving customer experience, improving customer service, and because we have been on this market for so long, we have such a broad and amazing perspective on how different teams approach Automation and look at Automation. And we also experienced many people who have a certain idea of automation. 

[00:04:23] And that might not necessarily be right. I'm actually surprised myself, but so many people still today consider automation within customer service as something that's about automating simple questions around order status, around return policy, and so on and so forth so building like these basic chatbots that support your agents in terms of working with all the questions from the customers, but that's how we kind of know that all 

[00:04:53] automation and AI has such a bigger impact and bigger potential for customer service teams. It's not just about automating those simple questions, it’s about increasing your agents' efficiency. I'm going from 10 tickets an hour,  to 20 tickets an hour, but without exhausting your agents, but actually while increasing your employee retention and making the job of agents easier and better basically on all counts.

[00:05:23] It’s also about better and easier customer service management per se so enabling the managers of the teams and those responsible for building these unique customer experiences by taking all the data and helping them to , analyze this data see through the data in customer service. We have hundreds if not thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of interactions every day with customers and getting through that noise and understanding what's happening. Where are we falling short and work? 

[00:05:53] Would we be better as a company? Where we could improve this customer experience is very difficult and AI has such a huge potential to enable getting those right insights and then building recommendations and improving the customer experience. And then lastly, I would say automation is not just about helping your teams work more efficiently today, but actually helping customers proactively get help whenever they need it in places where they need it, right? So basically kind of foreseeing the problem 

[00:06:23] Ahead of it actually happening and solving the problem before it even happens. And so automation has such a bigger potential and  at the end of the day, the person who suffers the most from us not understanding what automation is about is the customer and in here you see on the slide the data which was really shocking to me when I first saw it was that the average first response time to customer tickets is almost four hours today.

[00:06:53] It offers such a bad experience and especially their customer making the decision or having a problem or trying to buy a product you want this answer to happen much sooner and we believe the industry standard should be of course less than two hours. So cutting this resolution and response time by half, but that's how we would think it should go even further should be really within minutes and it has the potential to happen in the future within seconds. There is no reason why not. 

[00:07:23] You can see that most of us agree. Yes, automation is important. Yes, we want to improve that. But at the same time, only 6% of the leaders across customer service actually have experienced an increase in efficiency of their teams and and automations in 2023. And that is a shocking number and of course we should work to improve the numbers.

[00:07:53] Customer experience starts with the conversation around the right customer metrics and we would switch perfectly. And what are the metrics? , there is this saying what gets measured gets managed and I think it's such a true statement, especially for customer service. I think we should be discussing this. What are the right metrics for us? Because everyone agrees as you can see, 58% of customer service professionals believe that automation can increase efficiency.

[00:08:23] But what does this efficiency really mean? What does it translate to? What is efficiency in customer service? Are we working with many customers? We have identified those key metrics that are important and we believe that you should measure things like customer satisfaction. Which of course is a market standard, Time to response, which is a standard on the market, but also metrics such as employee retention, which shows the quality of the tools you're using internally as well. 

[00:08:53] As cost per ticket cost per ticket is a highly like many companies do it some others don't do it at all. We think that the cost per ticket shows very well the impacts and the benefits of AI and it should get measured, but of course this is not just about costs. Customer service is not just a cost machine, a sink hole basically for costs and spending. We think one last metric that customer service teams should be measuring is revenue per ticket, not just cost per ticket, because automation has the potential to help you guys generate more revenue and help your agents become better advisors to customers that of course results in the end with a better customer experience and better sales. And yeah, that would be my intro, happy to hear what you guys think about it....

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