It is common to see customer service as an expense; therefore, its cost should be minimized. You are probably familiar with writing in a live chat and not getting any answer. Or, not so much better, getting an automatic reply from a chatbot. Then, probably closing the browser without returning.
We are a Customer Service BPO(Business Process Outsourcing) company. But we see customer service as bringing profits, directly and indirectly. Directly by generating new leads for your business and indirectly by keeping your existing customers from looking for your competitors. We like calling our service a “human chatbot”.
Our agents are located in Central America. It is an ideal location to outsource customer service because of its time zone. It is right below the USA, and European nighttime is an evening there. This allows us to adjust our team to our customers’ needs quickly keeping the costs low.
The case we started to work on
SparkTraffic is an average size SaaS company with clients from around the world. With India waking up a few hours earlier than the European office hours and the USA is working when it is office’s night time.
With averaging 38 chats and 434 messages per day, weekend drops from -40% to -60%, and night drops -70%, it didn’t seem commercially reasonable to hire more in-office live chat agents for night and weekend shifts. Especially keeping in mind how hard it is to find people willing to sacrifice nights to work in an office and higher wages for them.
Our objective was to eliminate unanswered chats 24/7 and help the main team during the rush hours while keeping the budget for customer support as low as possible.
How did we do it?
We started answering the chats. Even during the hours when the conversation volume was high, we welcomed all the visitors with an actual human conversation.
SparkTraffic has a FAQ page that covers most of the answers. And once our agents were connected to the chatbox, we could analyze the previous conversations to create a better knowledge base.
We understand that some businesses, especially startups may have no FAQ page yet and they may use other live chat software that is not txt.me. In this case, we handle the onboarding completely by ourselves, collecting the knowledge base on the go, learning from the real conversations we have.
What happened when we didn’t know the answer?
There were inquiries that we couldn’t resolve at the exact moment.
Some customers asked for a refund, some needed to change their account, and some questions were not present in the FAQ.
Once we stumble upon such a conversation, we create a ticket for the main team and inform the client that we have escalated the request to the proper department, and someone will contact them in not more than 24 hours.
If we saw similar requests repeatedly, we added them to our knowledge base. And, of course, with each conversation, our agents were getting more familiar with the business.
What was the result?
Before, the typical morning routine for the main team was to check all the unanswered chats from the night and write to the customers asking what assistance they were in need. The same applied to Mondays. Needless to say that such a routine didn’t align with the customers’ needs.
Starting with November 2021, the month we connected our agents to the website, the business’s churn rate started to decline with eliminating the lost chats, which immediately affected the profits.
The second noticeable improvement was a significant increase in the new trial account activations from the North and South American regions. We accounted that to the fact that all our agents speak fluent Spanish and a faster response rate during this time zone’s business hours.
How do their customers perceive us?
Another positive change was almost the complete disappearance of negative reviews. The company has reached an Excellent rating on Trustpilot and has kept it until now.
As you can see, we started to help with customer service when SparkTraffic has stopped receiving 5* reviews, and 1* started to come. We captured these screenshots on the 10th of March, and expect the positive reviews to grow even more this month. You can check the current reports on the SparkTraffic Trustpilot reviews page.
