How Freddy Self-service is helping businesses sail through customer demand spikes during the pandemic
[While this post is about Freddy Self-service, there’s much more to Freddy. Check out the ‘hunt’ for Freddy AI for CX here.]
The pandemic has fundamentally altered the landscape of business operations. Organizations around the world are leveraging technology to address health and safety concerns brought to light in its wake. Across myriad sectors, including healthcare, digital education, and delivery services, the new normal has propelled the move online, bringing with it a significant surge in demand for support and a seamless customer experience.
To cater to the unprecedented increase in customer queries, businesses are increasingly leveraging the power of AI for faster support and resolution. For instance, Supr Daily, an online grocery delivery service, leveraged Freddy AI to manage an influx of customer requests, while Vedantu, a digital education provider that witnessed a dramatic surge in online traffic, used Freddy Self-service bots to encourage self-service, enhancing the overall customer experience. With the intent to efficiently engage with customers, Freddy bots are built with an effective combination of IQ and EQ to automate answers, enable conversational flows, or bring a human agent onboard, depending on the needs of the customer.
How Supr Daily Addressed a Sudden Spurt in Queries
With stay-at-home orders quickly issued across India, the food industry needed to rapidly evolve if it was to address the new realities of commerce. Consumers were equally impacted and anxious. Questions abounded. “What food is available? Can I get prepared food? What about perishables? How will I receive it? What are my payment options?”
Adding to this uncertainty, many food factories and production facilities also faced a shortage in labor.
Grocery delivery services like Supr Daily needed to address consumer concerns, continue operations within the new guidelines, and do it efficiently and effectively.
Deepika Mallyk, Senior Product Manager with Supr Daily, recalls the madness: “We saw a spike in order volume one day before the lockdown was even announced. The pandemic had already prompted many people to start online grocery orders because of safety concerns. That’s when we also faced new challenges due to government limitations, supply chain hurdles, and limited customer support staff due to precautionary restrictions.”
“We have about 150,000 customers and our agents handle 7,000 conversations every day through Freshworks Freshchat solution,” said Deepika. Typically, Supr Daily’s 150+ customer support personnel deflected 10% of queries through bot-workflows—mostly routine concerns such as if Supr Daily delivers in a customer’s city/town or customers not receiving their full order. During the lockdown, however, customer queries jumped 2.5x to 17,500 per day. Customers began asking if Supr Daily serves their society, and frequently wanted to be given the status of their orders to know whether it was being delayed or on time. “At this point, we realized we needed to expand the scope of our Freddy Self-service use case,” she said. “If we were going to have any chance of keeping pace with customer experience and helping people to stay at home more, it was clear technology had to do some of the heavy lifting.”
Leveraging the bots from Freddy Self-service, Deepika and team automated responses to common questions and handled 90% of the queries with little to no human intervention. “Once I got accustomed to the bot builder, I could increase the scope of our auto-complaint creation process,” explained Deepika. “In the end, Freshworks enabled us to handle this huge increase without additional staff.”
How Vedantu Managed the Surge in Demand
With stay-at-home orders placed on India’s 1.3 billion residents, citizens needed to make dramatic shifts in their daily lives. As educational institutions suspended operations, Indians flocked to online platforms to continue their education. In a make it or break it moment, Vedantu, India’s largest online tutoring platform, needed to rapidly adjust to this surge in demand.
Since the Covid pandemic began affecting India, Vedantu has seen a 3x increase in visitors to its platform. “We are getting more page registrations than ever before,” noted Prithu Sharma, Product Manager at Vedantu. “As a consequence, we’ve also seen a corresponding increase in traffic to our customer support portal.” Vedantu’s inbound tickets rose dramatically from 3,500/day to nearly 12,000/day. In order to keep pace, Vedantu relied on recent technological upgrades powered by Freshworks.
“One of the keys was moving from a manual to bot-supported process to handle our inbound tickets,” said Prithu. “We recently finalized our implementation of bots from Freddy Self-service, which couldn’t have come at a better time.” With the chatbot, Vedantu was able to deflect 80% of overall ticket volume and maintain its current staff levels at 14 agents. Prithu and team have pushed to incorporate bot-flows wherever possible. Today, 90% of all bot-initiated conversations are resolved without human intervention.
In addition, their response times have dramatically improved. “There’s been a massive change in our SLAs,” says Prithu. Our first response time has seen a major improvement — from about a day to just minutes.” Vedantu’s CSAT scores also increased by over 50%.
Chatbots not only help to take a load off agents, but also provide clarity across all business functions. “We want to continue investing in our chatbot technology,” concluded Prithu. “We see it as a valuable source of information on how our customers are engaging with us. Ultimately, we hope to create an even better, more satisfying experience.”
Managing the Road Ahead
The pandemic has fundamentally changed how businesses will move forward—where the only certainty is uncertainty. Companies like Supr Daily and Vedantu looked to technology to help them overcome the unknowable—from dramatic shifts in the food delivery business to the shuttering of traditional educational institutions. Today they Supr Daily and Vedantu continue to operate and serve customers amid fluctuations and uncertainty with the help of Freddy AI. And while their operations may have changed to a great extent, it’s mostly business as usual for them—thanks to the power of Freddy AI .
If you’d like to see how Freddy Self-service can help your business better serve your customers during this uncertain time, click here for more information.
