Multinational electronics corporation reduces customer service response times during the busiest shopping season of the year

Like any large retail company, they see a huge spike in customer inquiries around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In Germany, the company’s customer service agents usually receive about 2,500 emails per week. But in the weeks following these two major shopping holidays, that number spikes to as many as 12,000 emails in a seven-day span, as customers snap up smartphones, tablets, and other consumer electronics. The electronic corporation’s contact center operations manager in Germany says that, every year, he has to staff up for the season in order to handle the increased email volume.

“It takes four weeks to train new agents just for the holiday shopping season,” he says. “And then they’re usually about three times slower than more senior agents, simply because they’re new.”

The process is an enormous, perennial challenge for the operations manager, which is why — last year — he went searching for something better. He wanted a solution that:

• Reduces training and onboarding time required for new agents, enabling them to ramp up quickly with no loss in overall agent productivity
• Reduces the possibility of spelling or grammar errors for agents for whom German is a second language
• Enables agents to handle email case volume with greater efficiency and faster response times

With Sprinklr AI and intent detection, he set out to understand the top issues being surfaced in incoming customer emails. He discovered that 80-90% of all email cases are related to five primary topics, including questions about refunds, order cancellations, and delivery status. With this knowledge, the team revamped training for seasonal agents to focus on the specific topics in which they would become specialists.

The team then utilized intent-based suggestions, powered by Sprinklr’s patented Smart Responses capability, which provides agents with one-click suggested responses for faster handling of customer queries. This eliminates the need for an agent to compose a reply from scratch or search for a suitable response for each customer situation.

“Sprinklr’s Smart Responses are especially helpful for agents in our eastern European contact centers, where German is not their first language,” says the operations manager. “It enables them to respond more quickly to emails and reduces the chance of them making spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.”

Soon, the team will also leverage Sprinklr Service’s intent-based routing capability, which uses AI to categorize emails by topic and route them to agents trained to handle those topics. This means the customer is matched with the best qualified agent, ensuring timely and effective responses to their email inquiries.

• Reduced time to train new agents. When the contact centers staffed up for the holiday shopping season, agent training took just three to five days, compared with the usual four weeks. With intent detection, agents were trained to specialize in the five top email topics.
• Reduced handle time. While new agents typically take three times longer to handle cases than more senior agents, intent-based suggestions meant there was no difference in handle time for new hires compared to their more seasoned colleagues.
• Improved case response time. Within three months of launching Sprinklr’s AI Intents model, the electronics corporation reduced its average email case response time by 28%.

“In years past, when the holiday shopping spike hit our contact centers, we just tried to survive and answer inquiries as fast as we could,” says the operations manager. “Sprinklr Service has already had a huge impact on our ability to handle email inquiries and serve our customers, and I look forward to seeing how much better we can get, as we expand Sprinklr across more customer service channels.”