Author Details:
- Name: Julian Durand Burgoyne
- Title: Sr. Manager, Digital Engagement and Social Media
- Company: Videotron
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Videotron is a Canadian telecommunications leader. A wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., Videotron is an integrated communications company engaged in cable television, interactive multimedia development, Internet access, cable telephone and wireless telephone services.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
My team handles digital engagement and social media both for customer service and technical support. We handle all things digital in the customer service space for Videotron.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Over the years we deployed a strategy of serving the customer on the channel of their choosing. We deployed capabilities with Khoros to enable us to do just that. Secure forms helped us authenticate customers and allowed us to serve them on a broader range of channels previously inaccessible.
We previously had no contact entry point on our support website. The initial reason behind this being we wanted to promote self-service to avoid costs. However, after deploying support on so many channels it didn’t make sense to keep our support site without a way to contact us. We expected that adding messaging capabilities on that section of our website would drive significant volumes that we were maybe not ready to handle. We decided it was time for us to try automation, which we always were skeptical of. This skepticism stemmed from expecting our customer base to hate having to speak to a bot. We were skeptical of traditional bots, since customer service is our DNA and we found bots to be a bit too cold and non-personal. Additionally, accuracy of the GenAI was also a concern, though all of this was dispelled with the POC.
Videotron being a leader in customer service satisfaction when we launched automation we wanted to do it right. So, we partnered with Khoros to test in one fell swoop, brand messenger, Flow and the new Helix AI capabilities. In a few months we built and trained a virtual assistant with knowledge of our entire support website that leverages Helix Generative AI capabilities to answer customers in a fluid, in depth and personalized way.
What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved.
It allowed us to launch a new major contact point, driving new volumes in Khoros Care, while also deflecting contacts that could be answered without a current support site for the type of customer that didn’t want to search the site and would’ve contacted us. We have doubled our incoming volume within Khoros Care. We achieved for the first time parity with our live chat and conversations incoming within Care. Around a third of the volume coming into our bot doesn’t end up to an agent.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
The new entry point brought 50% new conversations from what we had before launching it, which is roughly 12,000 new conversations per month.
However, thanks to the automation in that channel, 56% of those conversations never make it to an agent. Some of it we think goes to another channel, based on issue type that cannot be resolved by bot, but still didn't go through to a handover.
Real estimated deflection is around 80% of that 56%, so roughly a third of all incoming volume in the bot.
36% of all incoming volume from our support site is deflected. 36% of incoming volume on the entry point in our support site is the bot.
The 20% difference is from the customers choosing to not stay for the asynchronous messaging in Brand Messenger and choosing to call us or use our live chat. Conversations that make it to an agent are on average 22% faster than similar private conversations on our other Khoros Care channels. So even when a handoff is necessary the information gathered with the virtual assistant helps the agent handle the situation faster.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
We were expecting agents to be apprehensive of AI, but it wasn't the case. They welcomed the help provided by the bot. It helped us find gaps or issues that flew under the radar, having lots of volume being tagged by AI Insights. It also helped us establish a better process where the web teams broadcast changes done to the website since it now can conflict with the bot knowledge.
What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved?
Flow was easy to learn and allowed us our very small project team of 2, to deploy, modify, and iterate on our AI project. It’s a great too allowing us to quickly find bugs and issues and fix them without needing code knowledge or any internal IT resources that can have an impact somewhere else. Generative AI can be a complex matter, but Khoros’ team was instrumental in allowing us to deliver a working prototype that passed all of our test in order to be client facing. Once the GenAI part was working, building the actual bot in Flow around it was easy to do. Flow is very user friendly the no code – low code approach works wonders in enabling users to build what they envision without the need to involved a big team of developers. We love the fact that the GenAI works as a part of flow and that we can build around it. That allows to be more focused and handhold the end user when needed and leverage the GenAI when it is the time to do so.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Not only is the technology great and easy to use, but Khoros’ accessibility as a partner, ease of communication and collaboration stands out as a defining facilitating factor what we managed to deliver. We always greatly appreciated Khoros for their quick and accessible support and in project like these it makes a world of difference having access to the right people at the right moment. Khoros’ team took the time to guide us and train us at our own pace enabling us to be able to quickly get a grip on Flow thus allowing us to work even better with the team assisting us in building the solution.