Big Bus Tours boosts profits with AI-powered customer service

Big Bus Tours serves six million tourists annually with its iconic open-top sightseeing tours across 27 cities worldwide. The company's customer service hub handles massive volumes of interactions across multiple channels, creating a valuable opportunity for support agents to drive additional sales alongside their service duties.

While the company prides itself on exceptional customer service, adding sales responsibilities risked compromising that quality. Ollie Wildeman, vice president of customer, recognized that agents would need both training and technological support to increase productivity and create capacity for sales activities.

By implementing Freddy AI Copilot within their existing Freshdesk solution, and implementing a customer-facing AI assistant powered by Satisfi, Big Bus Tours achieved remarkable efficiency gains. Agents now save up to 20% of their time on each interaction through automated documentation and AI-assisted responses. This productivity boost has transformed the customer service hub into a profit center, with sales revenue recouping 72% of productive hour costs in 2024—and sometimes exceeding 100% in peak months.

The company

Big Bus Tours is the world’s largest operator of open-top sightseeing tours. From its start 33 years ago with just three buses, the business has expanded to a global fleet operating in 27 cities across four continents, serving six million tourists every year.

The challenge

Big Bus Tours has built its reputation as a leader in city tours by blending customer service with sales opportunities. On the ground, street agents and bus staff assist customers directly, providing service while also generating significant revenue through ticket sales and upgrades.

The company had already implemented Freshdesk as their customer service platform to manage inquiries across channels efficiently. While this provided a solid foundation for basic customer support, the customer service hub faced a different challenge than their on-ground teams.

"Our customer service agents were spending 15 minutes on a typical interaction—11 minutes resolving the issue and another four documenting it—leaving no capacity for revenue-generating activities," explains Wildeman.

Despite having Freshdesk to handle routing and management of customer inquiries, agents still spent too much time on administrative tasks and basic resolution processes. Wildeman identified an opportunity to turn the customer service hub into a sales channel, similar to the company's successful on-the-ground model.

"We faced a difficult choice," Wildeman continues. "We could either maintain our service quality or push agents to sell more, potentially compromising the customer experience that built our reputation."

The company needed to augment their Freshdesk platform with capabilities that would increase agent productivity, without hiring more staff. Administrative tasks were the clear bottleneck, with agents spending nearly 30% of their time on documentation instead of meaningful customer interactions or sales opportunities.

"We knew we needed to enhance our technology stack," says Wildeman. "We needed a solution that could eliminate repetitive tasks, assist agents in real-time, and integrate seamlessly with our existing Freshdesk implementation."

The solution

To address their productivity challenge and enable sales activities within their customer service hub, Big Bus Tours enhanced their existing Freshdesk implementation with Freddy AI Copilot.

"Freshdesk was already providing us with the essential routing capabilities to match inquiries with the right agents based on expertise and language," notes Wildeman. "Adding Freddy AI Copilot provided the ability to automate the administrative tasks that were consuming too much of our agents' time."

The implementation addressed their core challenges in two key ways:

1. First, Freddy AI Copilot's Summarizer feature eliminated the documentation bottleneck by automatically generating conversation notes, saving the four minutes agents had been spending after each interaction.

2. Second, the AI assistant helped agents draft responses more quickly, suggest appropriate replies, and enhance tone—reducing average handling time.

"What made Freddy AI Copilot effective was how it targeted our specific productivity issues," Wildeman explains. "It allowed us to streamline processes and change how our agents worked."

With this increased capacity, agents could transition to a hybrid service-sales role. When helping customers modify bookings, agents could now suggest upgraded packages or additional experiences. The time saved through automation was reinvested in revenue-generating conversations.

Impact 

With the addition of Freddy AI Copilot, Big Bus Tours achieved a 20% reduction in average resolution and handling time across all customer interactions. This efficiency gain has launched a transformation of Big Bus’s customer service hub from a cost center into a profit center, with sales revenue recouping 72% of customer service costs annually—almost three times the initial 25% target. Agent satisfaction has also improved significantly, with the employer net promoter score rising by 22% following the AI implementation.

"One month we even achieved a 110% recoup rate, meaning that the customer service hub brought in more revenue than it cost," says Wildeman. "Once agents experienced Freddy AI Copilot, they couldn't imagine working without it."