Freddy AI Copilot delivers ‘massive impact’ for South African retailer Coricraft

To compete in today’s modern furniture market, South African retailer Coricraft knows that customer service has to extend beyond its 42 showrooms in South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. When major home purchases, such as handcrafted couches and headboards, take months to arrive, providing customer updates is vital to retaining customers and expanding the business.

But it’s also hard to pull off in a typical call center—which is why Coricraft, which had already been using Freshdesk for ticket resolution and customer support since March 2023—turned to Freddy AI Copilot to provide its service agents some much-needed, AI-powered relief.

Instead of sifting through long conversations (some as long as 40 emails), Freddy’s Summarizer feature allows agents to quickly recap a customer’s previous interactions, while Tone Enhancer helps them “come across in the correct manner,”  said Cindy Wooi, a call center manager at Coricraft, during a recent Freshworks customer event in Johannesburg.

Here are some other highlights Wooi shared in a Q&A during the event:

What challenges led you to start using Freshdesk? 

We started playing around with ticketing systems during the lockdown in 2021, and we couldn’t find one that was as workable as Freshdesk. A lot of inbound tickets get pushed to us and we also make outbound calls to customers, covering everything from order status to payments.

Freshdesk made it easy for us to have ticket types and set up pending rules and priorities for certain tickets, which isn’t something any other ticketing system could do for us.

What prompted your decision to give Freddy AI Copilot a try?

I attended a lot of webinars before Freddy AI Copilot was available. The moment it was available in beta, we switched it on for the call center. South Africa has diverse languages [there are 12 official languages], and our agents sometimes need help communicating via chat and email. Freddy AI Copilot had a massive impact for us. The call center agents feel more comfortable chatting with our customers because Freddy makes it a lot easier for them to communicate correctly and in a very customer-centric way.

What specific features of Freddy AI Copilot do you use the most?

We use a lot of the enhanced tone with text, especially in emails and on chat. It helps agents who don't speak English as their first language—and it helps customers understand what’s going on with their orders. 

We also use the ticket summary capability. We have clients who have bought from us over the years or months. An email thread might span 40 or more emails that need to be escalated to a manager. 

Instead of spending hours going through these tickets, notes, and emails, Freddy summarizes it for us, which is awesome. The same goes for the chat summary on Freshchat. Once an agent goes onto the chat assigned to them, they already know what the customer wants without having to scroll or look at other tickets.

What upcoming features are you excited about?

I am excited for Freddy AI Insights. Customer service is the most important part of my job, so it's great for me to be able to click a button to ask Freddy what's really going on: What are the customers complaining about the most? Which of our agents are top-performing? Who is getting back to our customers the fastest? Who is taking too long? Which tickets are not being sorted as quickly as possible?

That analysis will be great for us. These have been already available to us through Freshdesk Analytics, but I think not having to build reports and getting the insights quickly through Freddy is excellent. 

I also can't wait for our relationship with Freshdesk in the long run in terms of integrating the chatbots with the website, especially for sales. It is so easy now that you can type out what you want and a chatbot gets created—which is absolutely amazing.