tado° is a solution for intelligent climate control, offering smart thermostats and apps to help people take more responsibility for their energy consumption in their households.
Since implementing Intercom in 2019, smart home climate solution tado° has evolved from specializing in smart thermostats to entering the energy provider market. Intercom’s AI-powered tools like Fin AI Agent have been critical in empowering the team to extend fast, tailored support to new and distinct customer bases as their business has grown.
With an IoT product that is revolutionizing the energy and utilities sector, tado° is on a mission to change the way we think about and consume energy. Its smart home technology helps customers understand and regulate their energy consumption intuitively, driving forward a new model of heating and cooling as a service.
The team has been using Intercom since 2019 when they switched from Zendesk to support and engage customers at every stage of their journey, and recently decided to implement Fin AI Agent to help them scale their support alongside their growing customer base – without driving up overhead costs.
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Increasing access to smart climate control technology
The heating and cooling of buildings accounts for approximately a third of all global energy consumption, which is one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions on the planet. On a mission to reduce this impact, the tado° team wants to make its climate solution technology widely accessible and ensure people are set up for success to use it – which is why they need an efficient, scalable customer service platform to help them do it.
With Intercom, tado° is able to:
Use Fin AI Agent to help the team to deliver high-caliber, fast, and efficient support in all six languages that tado° supports. This has been especially crucial to the team as the business has expanded in both scope and complexity in recent years to adapt to the ever-changing energy landscape, meaning its customer base is now bigger and more nuanced than ever.
Leverage proactive support capabilities to identify areas in its platform where customers are at risk of running into difficulty and guide them through the process of getting set up using its products to ensure a smooth experience.
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Managing seasonal volume spikes with AI
In addition to managing a fast-growing customer base, the nature of tado°’s business is also seasonal and can experience significant spikes in support volume with changing weather conditions. This makes having a customer service platform that can manage sudden, drastic increases even more crucial.
During its busiest periods, tado° typically experiences a rise in conversation volumes of anywhere up to 400%, seeing an average of 11,000 customers reaching out every week, compared to the usual 10,000 they see each month outside of peak season. For years, tado° consistently saw a drop in CSAT scores during its busy winter heating season. “Usually our CSAT scores suffer as we get busier due to longer waiting times, and the fact that it’s more frustrating to have problems with your heating system when it's cold,” says Emily McKay, CX Content Writer at tado°. “But with Fin, we found that our CSAT scores remained really stable. In fact, they even improved compared with the same period last year.”
tado° CSAT scores during the peak seasons 2022 vs. 2023
“Usually our CSAT scores suffer as we get busier but with Fin, we found that our CSAT scores remained really stable. In fact, they even improved compared with the same period last year.”Emily McKay, CX Content Writer at tado°
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Smart support 🤝 Workflows
With such a varied group of customers, tado° needed to be able to carefully tailor its support offering to ensure it was meeting each customer’s unique needs. To do that, the team uses Workflows to highly customize the user experience across both self-serve and human support.
Here’s a closer look at how they’ve configured Workflows:
Personalizing the end-to-end experience
The team has set up a workflow that enables Fin AI Agent to gather valuable information about each customer when they reach out for support. Now whenever someone gets in touch, Fin is able to instantly identify:
Which customer group the individual belongs to.
Whether they’re interested in automating their heat pump to use only the cheapest and greenest energy.
If they have questions about the new tado° EV Smart Charging app.
If they want to know how to turn up their thermostat with voice commands.
Then, Fin can quickly guide customers down the right path and pull in relevant information from tado°’s help centers to provide them with the information they need and resolve their query. And, based on the team’s improved CSAT score, this highly personalized approach is certainly delighting customers.
Collecting feedback to fuel continuous improvement
tado° cares deeply about the experience of its customers, so to help keep a pulse on the effectiveness of its support content, the team also created a workflow to request feedback from a user who reacts negatively to an article. According to the team, this is an invaluable channel that they can use to drive direct and continuous improvement of their help center content.
They even have a dedicated CX Content team that is responsible for ensuring the company’s voice and tone is carried through all of their help center documentation, macros saved in the Inbox, as well as answers that Workflows is serving up to customers – showing their commitment to upholding quality across their support.
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Powering innovation with Intercom
In addition to using Intercom to provide a standout experience for their customers, the tado° team also leverages the platform to drive product development, share the voice of the customer internally, and foster a strong culture of collaboration.
Within the Inbox, the Support team uses tags to classify conversation topics and automatically extracts these to analyze the types of issues their customers are experiencing. Armed with these insights and the feedback that emerges from support conversations, they can work more closely with cross-functional development teams within tado° to help improve the product and ensure they’re meeting their customers’ needs.
According to tado°’s Support team, having this level of insight into customer pain points is empowering them to drive innovation across the business as they continue to build towards a sustainable future. And being able to foster and maintain strong, personal relationships with their customers along the way is one of the many reasons they trust Intercom.
