When Clay went in search of an AI agent for customer service, the team wanted to address three major challenges:

1. Scaling support across multiple channels while keeping community at the core

Before Intercom, Clay’s customer service was primarily based in the company’s Slack community, which has 20,000 members. “Community is a hugely important piece of what makes Clay great,” says Jess Bergson, Head of CX at Clay. “Providing support through our Slack community was good for our customers, but we weren’t doing anything sophisticated in terms of automation – it was all very manual. That made it challenging for the team to be able to prioritize tickets and manage growing support volume.” George Dilthey, Head of Support at Clay, adds, “It was also a bit of a friction point that whenever someone wanted to ask a question, they had to go to Slack. It was great to help us grow the community and the company, but it was just becoming difficult to manage.”

Having started out with a three-person support team, each answering upwards of 200 tickets per week, Clay needed a more scalable way to offer personalized support to its customers. “Our customer base continued to grow and grow, and without AI, we’d have needed to double the size of the team to keep up. So really, the only answer for us was to make AI work,” says Jess.

2. Reducing team stress levels

With a fast-growing customer base – and support volume, as a result – Clay’s support team was getting inundated with questions and didn’t have automation set up to help lighten the load. “Before Fin, the team was super strapped,” Jess notes. "They were pretty stressed. I think there were parts of their job that they were feeling extremely fulfilled by, but there were also parts that they were feeling bogged down by.”

3. Helping customers faster

Clay’s community-led approach to support was a great way for the team to get close to their customers and provide hands-on, high-touch support. But as the community grew, it came at a cost – which, in this case, was speed.

“Our customers were waiting a really long time to get answers to their questions. Four, five, even six hours,” says Jess. Highlighting the impact of this, George shares, “It was frustrating to see that customers were having to wait that long for an answer to a question AI could have answered. But because our queue was first in, first out, we didn’t have a way to identify those low-hanging fruit questions and answer them as quickly as I knew we could have. That’s when I really started to look at solutions that could help tackle that problem, but still create a strong customer experience.”

Clay went in search of a powerful AI agent and customer service platform to help overcome these challenges. “We were looking for strong technology, and a team that could back us to get to the place we needed for this to be successful,” says Jess. “We found both of those things with Fin and Intercom.”

In the search for an AI agent, two key considerations for Clay were:

1. Team buy-in

It was important to Jess and George that the support team was excited about bringing on this new technology, so they involved the entire team in testing Fin. “We didn't want them to feel bad or scared about it, we wanted them to feel excited and see all the opportunities it would create,” Jess explains.

When they began testing Fin, the team quickly saw its impact in action. “We started to see that Fin wasn’t just doing a really good job with our tier one tickets that were easier to answer,” says George. “With Fin Workflows and Actions, we were able to configure it to answer tier two and even tier three questions, and connect it with our internal systems for managing things like refunds. That’s something we haven’t been able to automate in the past, but now it’s like the world is our oyster because we can tap into all these other systems that we weren’t able to before.”

2. Control over the customer experience

A vital factor in Clay’s decision to implement Fin was that it allowed them to maintain control over their customers’ support experience.

“There’s a lot of transparency baked into how you configure Fin and build the workflows, which gives us control over the end-to-end experience,” explains George. “That was the light bulb moment for us; we were going to be letting this thing loose on our support queue, so we needed to have that level of transparency and control over the experience.”

There are a number of ways to approach rolling out AI, and for Clay, the team decided to start small and build. For the initial rollout, they deployed Fin in their in-app chat, and once they saw how it was performing, expanded Fin’s coverage to their Slack and email channels. 

“I knew Intercom was best in class for chat support, so we prioritized that first,” says George. “We then worked closely with the Intercom team and their partner, Channeled – a third-party app that allows you to connect Intercom with Slack – to get Fin into our community there, and also rolled Fin out over email. That was a huge win for us.” Jess adds, “Deploying Fin in Slack and over email was honestly terrifying for me. Our Slack community in particular is extremely public, so there’s no margin for error. But we did it, and I will say I was very pleasantly surprised. I expected it to be a bumpier rollout than it was, but it was quite smooth.”

Since implementing Fin, Clay has been able to dramatically scale its support to help more customers on more channels, maintain a strong sense of community with its 20,000 members, and make the support team’s day-to-day more fulfilling.

Moving the needle on key metrics

Some of the results the team has seen so far include:

• Fin involvement rate: Fin is now involved in 90% of Clay’s conversations across all channels.

• Fin resolution rate: Having started out with a 20% resolution rate when they first rolled out Fin for in-app messaging, the team has now boosted that to between 45-50% across every support channel. With Fin resolving up to half of all support queries – which can total 7,000 per month – the team has more time to focus on the challenging, strategic queries and champion the voice of the customer within Clay.

• Fin CSAT: The quality of the customer experience is hugely important to the Clay team, so they’re closely monitoring Fin’s CSAT ratings to ensure that quality is maintained at every touchpoint.

“To measure the success of Fin, we track a lot of the normal things like resolution and involvement rate. But one of the interesting things I've noticed is that a lot of the success metrics we had before Fin have started to shift,” says George. “A good example of that is ‘one-touch tickets,’ so how often my team is able to close out the ticket in one answer. Now that we have Fin, we’ve realized that if you're able to answer a question with one response, it's probably something AI could and should be doing.”

Transforming the team and customer experience

“Life with Fin is great,” says Jess. “Our team is now answering the most complex, strategic, technical questions and agents aren’t being overloaded with tickets. It’s really transformed the culture and roles on our support team.”

For Clay’s customers, Fin has transformed their experience in three major ways:

• Speed: Customers no longer need to wait even 10 seconds to get an answer to their question. As Jess notes, “Fin has almost become a little buddy that can ride alongside them to support them in real-time.”

• Improved support content: Clay’s Support team can now share insights on content gaps with the Education and Content Marketing teams so they can create the right content to proactively help customers before they even have to ask questions.

• Insight into customer challenges: Since implementing Fin, Clay has been able to glean far more insights about product feature requests, improvements, and customer challenges, and communicate those back to the Product team.

George shares, “Our customers are pretty thrilled with the way that we've implemented Fin. They're happy that they can get faster answers to their questions and get up and running using Clay at a rapid pace. And I’m excited to see that our team is much happier. That’s always been the goal of implementing AI – it was never to replace humans, it was to replace the tedious parts of the job that they were doing and shouldn’t have been.”

Beyond just performance, Clay’s strong partnership with Intercom ultimately became one of the driving forces behind their decision to implement Fin.

“One of the most inspiring parts of this AI journey has been seeing how the Intercom team really took on the role of customer success,” says Jess. “As a customer success professional myself, I don't typically get inspired by seeing other customer success experiences, but I truly believe that the way the Intercom team has supported us is one of the most inspiring examples of strong customer success that I've seen. I honestly expected the smaller, newer startups in the market to act the way that we want partners to act with us, which is to be scrappy and feel like a part of our team. I didn't expect that from Intercom.” George adds, “Throughout the whole process, it felt like Intercom really took us under their wing and helped us be successful with Fin.”

When asked what advice they’d give to other leaders considering adopting AI for customer service, George notes, “Make sure you’re keeping what’s important to you and your business up front and center at all times. For us, that was transparency and control over the customer experience so we could ensure our quality bar was maintained. Focusing on the end goal helped us come to the right decision because we knew what was important to us.” Adding to this, Jess shares, “We’re in a world where lots is changing and we’re still learning about AI. The most important thing I would express to other CX leaders is that it’s crucial to have the right partners alongside you to teach you what you need to know to be successful in this world.”