How a chatbot sped up our tech support resolution time by 50%
Main illustration: Jason Yim
If your support team is routinely asking the same set of questions at the start of every chat conversation, it’s time to ask if you’re using the right tools to triage support issues.
Recently our internal tech support team found themselves in this situation while providing support to our 650-person team spread across five offices and timezones. They offer rescue for a broad swath of issues, from account lockouts to AV issues and hardware requests.
As you can imagine, some of these issues require immediate resolution while others are less urgent. To properly triage new requests and route them to the right specialist on the team, it was critical to gather a standard set of details for each request. In the past, the team manually collected these details, but that was negatively impacting their resolution time and not the best use of people’s time.
In search for a better solution, the team recently started using Custom Bots – our highly customizable bots for sales and support workflows – to reply to inbound requests and triage issues for the team. The result? Our team saw its resolution time drop by a whopping 50%, which translated to 39 minutes saved per issue.
Our tech support team’s Custom Bot
Think of what your team can do with that kind of extra time. The bot unlocks a massive amount of time for the team because it uses a set of structured questions to collect pertinent details from people before their conversation lands in the team’s inbox. Our tech support specialists have all the details they need the minute they pick up the conversation. They can get straight to work on the resolution instead of spending time on follow-up.
“Since implementing Custom Bots, the team saw its resolution time drop by a whopping 50%”
What’s more, the bot automatically tags new conversations in the background, reducing the time that the team had to spend on reporting while improving insights into the kinds of requests they were receiving.
Improve how you triage support conversations
This need to triage is not unique to our tech support team alone. A triaging process is something that all support leaders start to think about once their product’s userbase reaches a certain point and their team is no longer able to keep up with the volume of questions they’re seeing. As a support manager, you can try to throw money at the problem and hire more people, but that’s not a realistic solution. A better approach is to look at how your team is spending its time and make sure team members are laser-focused on the top issues preventing your customers from using your product. A good triage process can help support teams properly assess issues and prioritize the most critical ones.
“Tools for triaging support conversations – especially support chats – have not advanced in years”
But tools for triaging support conversations – especially support chats – have not advanced in years. Triage remains manual, repetitive, unglamorous work. Teams often have a person whose whole job is to review new conversations, go back and forth with the customer to gather missing info, and pass the issue to the right specialist on their team. Painful, right? Some support managers even turn off chat and revert to lengthy forms and assignment rules just so they can make sure to get the information they need from customers.
As our tech support team saw, you don’t have to sacrifice chat support in order to work more efficiently. Modern chatbots are now capable of automating repetitive workflows, like triage for support teams and lead qualification for sales teams. In particular, we’ve seen support teams use Custom Bots to triage high volumes of incoming chats with ease, freeing up team members for more complex support questions that require human troubleshooting. These bot workflows are easy to set up and more importantly, they’re dead simple for your customers to use when they’re looking for help.
Here’s how Custom Bots can help you triage support issues:
- Proactively ask questions to accurately route conversations
- Collect information upfront (like customer type and issue severity) to flag priority conversations
- Automate actions like tagging, routing, and assigning
- Suggest helpful articles
How support teams are using Custom Bots
Check out how businesses of all stripes are using Custom Bots to offer more efficient, personal support.
Ed tech
Education platforms often field questions from a wide variety of users, from instructors to students to administrators. Custom Bots are helping teams efficiently route users to the right team for support.
To build this bot yourself, check out our education platform bot template.
Financial services
Think about the last time you signed up your business to use a new financial service, like accounting software. One of the first steps you likely took was to import data from other programs. This process can be complicated and support teams often see a high number of conversations from customers at this stage of sign-up. Custom Bots can help new users onboard by presenting helpful tips at the right time and proactively offering access to help.
To build this bot yourself, check out our financial services bot template.
IT support
IT teams are critical to ensuring smooth business operations and happy team members. They’re responsible for managing a wide variety of support requests – each with their own priority. Check out how a bot can gather standard info about the issue, and assign and prioritize it for the right team.
To build this bot yourself, check out our internal IT bot template.
Recruiting & HR
Attracting top talent is a big challenge for many businesses, and the hiring process usually starts with prospects checking out the careers page. Rather than using a traditional form, HR teams can use Custom Bots to engage prospective applicants. The Custom Bot below qualifies applicants, prioritizes a call-back based on the answers they selected or even automates common FAQs like hiring timelines and process.
To build this bot yourself, check out our recruiting bot template.
These are just a few examples of how bots are helping support teams deliver better customer experiences and faster resolutions. As your business grows, so will your support volume. Use chatbot automation to build smarter workflows for your team and provide great support experiences for your customers.
