waterdrop® uses AI automation to improve both the customer and employee experience
waterdrop® is on a mission to encourage people to drink more water with the pioneering Microdrink – compressing the best fruit and plant extracts into a cube so it can be added to a bottle of water. Like any company with a growing number of devoted customers, the customer experience is at the heart of what waterdrop® does.
Ticket prevention
Every time DigitalGenius and NetSuite automatically cancel or amend an order it prevents 3 or 4 further tickets from being created
Improved employee experience
Alleviating the burden of repetitive tasks allows agents to focus on the tickets where they can make a difference
More personalised service
Deflecting tickets from agents gives the customer success team greater time to offer a more personalised service
As a fast-growing business, the waterdrop® team wanted to be able to handle more tickets within their existing customer success team. They also wanted to offer more channels for customers to get in touch, but realised that they did not have the capacity to provide service through chat while maintaining a great customer experience.
waterdrop® realised that automation would help them to do this. “The automation we had before was quite basic – informing the customer we would get back to them in one business day,” Kane Sakata, Subject Matter Expert, Customer Success at waterdrop® told us.
On top of this, waterdrop® had a number of other goals in mind. These included:
- Offering support outside of business hours.
- Answering customers across 6 different languages.
- Being able to prevent orders being shipped when customers request to amend their order.
- Reducing the time and effort customer service agents would spend applying loyalty points to customer accounts.
- Freeing up agents to provide more personalised customer service.
To achieve these goals, waterdrop® turned to DigitalGenius.
Providing a more personalised service through automation
Kane and his team realised that if they were able to deflect tickets away from agents and resolve them without human involvement then this would have a massive impact. The customer success team would be able to offer a more personalised experience because they had more time to devote to individual customers with complex cases.
Using DigitalGenius and its integrations with waterdrop’s helpdesk, ecommerce platform and carriers, waterdrop® does not only automate responses but can actually resolve many of the repetitive tickets without an agent having to step in.
waterdrop® is now able to automatically resolve customer queries outside of normal business hours, across email, Facebook and Instagram. Plus, waterdrop® can resolve tickets across its six major languages, helping it to serve customers across Europe and the US.
“We wanted to be able to offer automation with a human touch, which we are able to do with DigitalGenius. We’ve been able to do more than just a standard automation – by catering responses depending on different statuses, we’re able to personalise the response as best as possible.” Kane said.
Automatically stopping cancelled and amended orders
If a customer requests to cancel or amend an order after placing it, this causes a big headache for most retailers. If an order has already been processed and dispatched then, depending on the retailer, the customer has to return the wrong item before a replacement can be shipped, or a replacement gets shipped while the retailer waits for the return.
But if the customer makes the request before that, then it should be possible to prevent the original order from being shipped, avoiding that headache entirely. “For us, it was the luck of the draw. If the customer reached out within an hour, and an agent picked the ticket up in time, then they could probably stop the order. But most of the time we wouldn’t be able to stop it.” Kane said.
However, this can now be automated through an integration with NetSuite. DigitalGenius can do all the checks that an agent has to do, and then perform the cancellation or change requests directly. This includes processing out of hours requests, when there would have been no chance an agent could have picked up the request in time.
This has the potential to save a huge amount of effort for agents. “This process effectively prevents 3 or 4 different tickets from being created – the return, the replacement, possibly the refund, and so on,” Kane points out. “The integration with NetSuite will save our agents so much time in the long run, while making the customer experience smoother. We’re still working on the logic to optimise it, but the next step is to deal with all requests when we have product launches or promotions because that adds some complexity.”
Reducing agent effort applying loyalty points
waterdrop® offers a loyalty program to its customers. For example, if a customer recycles one of their waterdrop® blisters at a store, they receive 5 loyalty points.
However, applying these points individually was time-consuming for the customer success team. The agent would have to calculate the amount of points to be added, manually look up the customer’s account in the loyalty platform, and then make a note to add it to the account.
But now, by integrating DigitalGenius to the loyalty platform, this process can be done automatically. DigitalGenius checks for the account and applies the points automatically, and only when there’s a duplicate or mismatched account does a human need to intervene. Processing 10 rows takes one minute, which is a massive saving on agent time.
On top of this, waterdrop® is able to proactively add loyalty points if an order is delayed by a certain amount of time, helping to address potential complaints before they come.
Improvements in processes
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3-4 tickets prevented per cancelled or amended order
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1 minute to process 10 loyalty points tasks
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16 weeks from 0 to 20% automation
Elevating the employee experience, as well as the customer experience
For waterdrop® customer experience is the number one priority, but for Kane employee experience is right up there. While the activity that waterdrop® is able to undertake with DigitalGenius has had an impact on costs elsewhere, the time and effort DigitalGenius has saved is perhaps greater.
“By alleviating the burden of repetitive tasks from the customer success team, our agents can focus on the tickets where they can really make a difference. We feel that this is a much better experience for them because they can actually use their skills and capabilities to provide a thoughtful response to a customer, rather than just saying, ‘Here’s a tracking link’.”
Like the customer experience, the employee experience is something that can be continuously improved. Every time DigitalGenius is able to take on another element of customer success, this is felt strongly by the team. “We get really positive feedback from the team whenever we update them on our work with DigitalGenius.”
6 languages
waterdrop® automates processes across English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian
Multiple integrations
Integrations with NetSuite, helpdesk, loyalty platform and marketing platform.
3 channels and counting
Automatic responses on email, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, with WhatsApp and Chat to come
What’s next
The journey with automation doesn’t stop here for waterdrop®. Among many other things on the roadmap are integrating chat and WhatsApp, including conversational automations through DigitalGenius’s chat widget.
On top of that, waterdrop® will look to integrate with other platforms in their arsenal, such as their marketing automation platform to automate GDPR requests, as well as using Aircall to bring phone calls into workflows.
Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, waterdrop® is looking to use DigitalGenius’s image recognition to detect any customer concerns with products. “This is an interesting use case, and we’re excited to use DigitalGenius to automatically detect these cases and then resolve it without agent involvement.”
