air up® achieve 600%+ ROI with DigitalGenius by embracing a human+AI approach to customer service
air up® is using generative AI through DigitalGenius to make AI-driven customer interactions feel like a natural dialogue, and to create “wow moments” with its customers.
Stats
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600%+ Return On Investment
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20+ Use Cases Fully Automated
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79% Requests to Change Items Fully Automated
air up® is revolutionising the way people drink water. The drinking system isn’t a regular bottle, instead it is the world’s first refillable scent-based drinking system that flavors water through scent alone. It’s a fast-growing business – having been founded in 2019 it grew by €159M in revenue by 2022.
Thomas Staudte is Head of Customer Engagement at air up®. His philosophy towards achieving customer service excellence is to strive to achieve a balance between hands (i.e. people) and technology. “There will always be tasks where hands are needed, but there is a lot of recurring boring work that can be handled by machines.”
As a result, Thomas looked to embrace automation at the earliest possible stage in air up’s® growth. So he turned to DigitalGenius to help him.
Seeing the potential in automation
“I was astonished at the beginning. The intent coverage was over 60% straight away. This meant that immediately we had insights that we could use for reporting and analytics and we could see where to start.”
Working closely with the DigitalGenius team air up® started with automating one use case, but by 6 months had covered and automated 16 use cases. “From there it was about fine-tuning, improving the accuracy and tone of voice. We started at such a high level and the pace just kept going,” Thomas said.
A crucial partnership
One of the important use cases for air up®, (next to “Where is my order”), was dealing with product handling questions related to its bottles. The issues were very unique to air up’s® product, as it is a completely new technology that flavours water by scent only, and so it required support from the DigitalGenius team.
“DigitalGenius accompanied us very closely throughout our journey. This was very cool for me – I never felt left alone. DigitalGenius was always suggesting the next step and helping us get there. Plus if anything went wrong, the support was so fast – we would have everything we needed within a day. This is not very common from a supplier.”
This crucial partnership allowed air up® to consistently raise the standard of what it was able to do with automation. For “Product handling” tickets, air up® has gone from automatically resolving 23% of tickets, to 59% in just 12 months.
Focusing on the customer experience
By embracing AI automation, the goal for air up® has always been to provide the best customer experience possible. Thomas believes that 90-95% of customers would never know that they were speaking to a machine, unless the responses were too fast to be human!
But people are still crucial to the customer experience. Some customer service professionals see AI as a threat, but not Thomas. “AI Automation will never fully replace human beings. It will just help you to scale and be more efficient on the people side.”
By letting AI take on the jobs it is best suited for, and letting air up’s® customer service team handle everything else, the CSAT scores for humans and AI are about the same. For air up® this ultimately results in less monotonous and repetitive work for the team, and customers get much faster response times to their questions.
Embracing generative AI
The most recent step in this partnership and dedication to customer experience is that air up® has embraced generative AI through DigitalGenius.
Air up® is using generative AI to answer FAQs for pre-purchase and “Where is my order” questions. By training an AI on air up® FAQ pages, DigitalGenius can generate a unique automatic response any time it is asked a question.
“We are excited to go live with pre-purchase questions. When customers visit our site, they naturally have questions like ‘How does the air up® system work?’ or ‘What are the flavours you provide?’. If we answer these questions, it can lead to a conversion. By using generative AI, we can automate this and ensure we are responding as quickly, and effectively as possible and still offer personalised dialogues, that are fully on brand.”
Thomas likens this to visiting the Apple Store and going to a Genius Bar. Knowing that you can always speak to a product expert when you have a question, and they can steer you in the right direction is critical to online conversions.
“For us, it is essential that customer interactions feel like a natural dialogue. It means that customers will experience fast and personalised service 24/7, and we will create “wow moments” with our customers. In short, using generative AI through DigitalGenius will completely transform how we engage with our customers.”
