Ticket Resolution Rate
84%
of WISMO tickets handled automatically
16%
fewer outsourced agents needed during peak
About
YouGarden is an online garden centre that believes in “Gardening for Everyone”. With a nursery based in rural Lincolnshire, YouGarden is able to provide customers with great quality plants because they’ve grown or curated the plants themselves.
Website
YouGarden’s peak is highly dependent on the weather as well as reliant to some degree on physical catalogues reaching loyal customers. With DigitalGenius’s help, the team were able to handle an unpredictable peak with 16% fewer agents than before.
The Challenge
On the first sunny weekend of the year, everyone wants to do some gardening. For YouGarden this creates an unpredictable peak. In previous years, the inevitable but unavoidable problems with logistics created a perfect storm where YouGarden’s team were not able to get back to customers quickly enough. As a result YouGarden wanted to be able to provide customers with fast answers to simple questions, and manage their peak period better. In 2024, the postal system struggled to deliver YouGarden’s catalogues on time, mostly because of the UK General Election, creating far more tickets than YouGarden predicted. Thankfully, YouGarden had DigitalGenius to help.
Solutions & Results
Rapid email response
YouGarden deployed Doug, their DigitalGenius-powered agent to provide quick responses to customers. This meant that the YouGarden team was protected from this unanticipated volume, and did not feel the same pressure as previous years. YouGarden required fewer outsourced agents and did not have to hire and train more agents to stay on top of the situation.
Re-routing calls to email
Email was proving to be more efficient than calls for many simple queries. So YouGarden encouraged callers to email instead. Thus, despite the overall increase in tickets this peak, the number of phone calls stayed within forecast.
The WISMO Widget
YouGarden deployed a WISMO (“Where is My Order”) widget to handle questions about orders. As a result 84% of WISMO queries are handled automatically. Also, the widget is able to pull data about individual items which an agent would not be able to find.
Plans to grow
The next steps for YouGarden are to start to move towards asynchronous chat by training “Baby Doug” to answer FAQs and questions around memberships. On top of that, using DigitalGenius’s Visual AI for image recognition, YouGarden will be able to detect damage to products automatically from customer photos, and issue replacements or escalate the ticket.
