Case Study: Spordle Scales Customer Support with 142% ROI
In 2022, Spordle embarked on a transformative journey by joining forces with Fourthought, a leading generative AI for customer service automation platform. This case study delves into the pivotal role that artificial intelligence (AI) has played in revolutionizing Spordle's customer success operations, ultimately enhancing daily business processes and ensuring heightened customer satisfaction.
BACKGROUND
Detail the industry or niche that Spordle operates in and provide context for the challenges faced by the company in ensuring customer success. Introduce Fourthought as a key partner, highlighting their expertise and significance in the collaboration.
The customer support team includes Gilles Taillon, Director of IT, and Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at Spordle.
CHALLENGES– Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at SpordleThe goals our customer support team is held to are similar to that of other support organizations: CSAT, deflections, and keeping our knowledge base up to date. These are all paramount.
Outline the specific challenges Spordle encountered regarding customer success, such as managing large volumes of customer data, ensuring timely and accurate responses to customer inquiries, and enhancing overall customer satisfaction.
Difficulty Maintaining Help Center Content
Spordle’s business, as well as its support ticket volume, is cyclical. Being a sports management platform, registration at the beginning of a new season is a massively busy time. One of Spordle’s biggest clients, Hockey Canada, recently made a few changes that would significantly increase program registrations.
Last year, registration numbers were so significant that customer support ticket volumes reached an all-time high. The customer support team of three full-time agents and one part-time agent could not handle the nearly 7000 support tickets monthly. This led to seven or eight other employees transitioning to work as full-time agents on top of their normal job responsibilities. Those employees often worked 14+ hour days to manage the influx of tickets.
Knowing that ticket volume may increase this year based on increasing registrations, the support team knew it had to make a change.
– Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at SpordleThe team was handling between 350 and 600+ tickets per day. This meant that customers grew impatient while agents worked on resolving tickets from a two-week backlog. We knew we had to make a change to improve our customers’ experience.
Spordle uses Forethought Solve as its chat widget. Solve, powered by SupportGPT™, uses generative AI to serve up accurate, human-like responses to chat inquiries automatically. Solve’s generative AI models are automatically trained on Spordle’s data, allowing it to comprehend sentence structure, meaning, and tone to extract the perfect answer from many documents.
Since Spordle’s business is based in Canada, the chat widget switches seamlessly between responding in French and English. With Workflow Builder, built-in generative AI enables Spordle’s support team to build automated workflows that detect customer intent to enable seamless self-service.
– Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at SpordleThe addition of SupportGPT has drastically increased case resolutions. We don’t need to put the exact sentence in the workflow anymore, SupportGPT offers up better, more accurate answers.
Customer Data Management: Discuss how AI has streamlined the process of managing vast amounts of customer data. Explore how automated data analysis and insights generation have empowered Spordle to make informed decisions and personalized customer interactions.
Automated Customer Interactions: Illustrate how AI-driven chatbots or virtual assistants have been implemented to provide real-time and personalized support to customers. Discuss the positive impact on response times and customer satisfaction.
Predictive Analytics for Customer Success: Explore how predictive analytics models have been employed to anticipate customer needs and preferences. Showcase examples of how this proactive approach has led to more effective customer engagement and increased retention rates.
RESULTSPresent quantitative and qualitative data showcasing the tangible results of the AI integration. This may include improvements in response times, customer satisfaction scores, and overall business performance.
Since March 1, 2023, Spordle has deflected 21,000 chat inquiries, with an 86% self-serve rate. Within the first week after implementation, over 600 tickets were instantly resolved through the chat widget. Three months after implementation, deflected tickets equated to 142% ROI.
- 142% ROI, three months post-implementation
- 86% self-serve rate
- 21,000 chat deflections
– Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at SpordleSince implementing Forethought, our agents are no longer exhausted from dealing with a heavy volume of tickets. We don’t get negative comments from customers about long resolution times, so it’s made all of our lives much easier.
FUTURE
Discuss the potential for further innovation and expansion of AI applications in Spordle's customer success strategy. Address any ongoing collaboration with Fourthought and the roadmap for continuous improvement. Spordle is excited to try out more of Forethought’s generative AI capabilities while expanding Forethought to other areas of its business.
– Gilles Taillon, Director of IT at SpordleI’m excited about the future of AI for customer support and where we can go with that. As we grow the business, we plan to use more AI features to help us scale.