Digital Transformation in Customer Service – 5 Inspirational Success Stories (Part 3 of 4)

September 28th, 2021 | Kate Rogerson | Customer Service | Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Welcome to part three in our series exploring digital transformation in customer service. In this series, we’ve been looking at how digital transformation is helping organizations transition to a digital customer service offering that benefit both them and their customers.

In the first part of this series, we looked at why businesses can no longer afford to ignore digital transformation. Through digital transformation in customer service, companies are improving efficiency, reducing workload on customer service agents, reducing costs, improving CSAT scores, and much more.

In the second part of digital transformation journey, we looked at five strategies for boosting success in a customer service transformation. That included tips on how to engage with leadership, collect feedback from your organization, and communicate change.

In this article, we’ll showcase five organizations that have successfully navigated digital transformation in customer service. We’ll look at the challenges that led these organizations to change and the benefits they’ve seen through the adoption of new customer service channels and technologies.

1. Lake Michigan Credit Union – Improving Member Support with Live Chat & Chatbot

Founded in 1933, Lake Michigan Credit Union (LMCU) is one of the largest credit unions in the United States, with more than half a million members. As LMCU has no corporate stockholders, LMCU is both owned by and accountable to its members. This unique structure has influenced LMCU’s core philosophy – to do what’s best and right for their members.

LMCU’s digital transformation journey began with a desire to increase accessibility and improve member services. The existing channels that LMCU had in place included phone, email, and online banking, and they wanted a modern solution to let customers connect more flexibly. Nate Knox, Applications Support with LMCU, noted that other institutions were offering live chat solutions, and LMCU saw a need to keep up technologically.

The solution to LMCU’s customer service transformation was Comm100 Live Chat, offering powerful features, ease of implementation, flexibility and mobile offerings. With live chat integration in their mobile app, LMCU’s members can also now conveniently get their questions answered on the go.

Following their digital transformation in customer service, LMCU saw increased member engagement and improved customer experience. Among the features that LMCU’s agents have enjoyed most, canned responses stand out by providing both group and private responses. This has allowed agents to maintain individual personality in their responses while reducing the need to send repetitive messages to common queries.

Since rolling out live chat, LMCU has bolstered their technology stack through the adoption of Comm100 AI Chatbot. This chatbot now provides 24/7 support to members, which has led to improved engagement and CSAT.

Many credit unions are behind in digital transformation, and within the banking and credit union sector, live chat adoption is just below 60%. With the adoption of live chat and chatbot technologies, LMCU is now a leader in customer service and can differentiate their support offerings from competitors.

From an IT perspective, the ability to plug in our own images and branding, and how the live chat code is generated dynamically for us to pick up and drop into our website, were extremely helpful for our development team. It makes it easy to troubleshoot when things do come up. The amount of logging and history that is reported is extremely helpful. I would say that it’s a really stable and secure system.

Nate Knox, Applications Support, Lake Michigan Credit Union

2. Canadian Blood Services – Devoting More Time to Complex Queries with AI Chatbot

Operating as an independent, not-for-profit organization, Canadian Blood Services (CBS) has established trust in Canada’s blood system for more than twenty years. CBS has a staff of 4,000 and 17,000 volunteers providing Canadians with blood, plasma, and stem cell services.

CBS’s digital transformation journey began with a desire to increase donor engagement by adopting new digital channels. With only phone and email support offered, CBS was missing potential donors that prefer the convenience of digital communications.

By introducing Comm100 Live Chat in September 2018, CBS saw immediate success in reaching digital-first customers. As live chat volumes soared, with 60 agents in place and 7,000 chats per month, it soon became clear that an AI chatbot was needed.

CBS introduced Comm100 AI Chatbot to manage the simple, repetitive questions that were taking up a substantial amount of the agents’ time. 70% of live chat queries are now diverted to the chatbot, and 68% of those are resolved without any human interaction. Relieved from common, low-value questions, agents can now devote more of their time resolving complex and sensitive queries that need extra attention and care.

Customer service can be a tough job for frontline agents, so it’s really important for us to make sure that we are doing everything we can to improve their everyday experience. Comm100 Live Chat helps a lot, and the chatbot even more. Before the chatbot, our agents were having to answer the same simple questions over and over again. With a chatbot now handling the vast majority of these questions, this is no longer an issue and our agents feel more engaged and fulfilled in their roles.

Denny Michaud, Customer Relations Manager, Canadian Blood Services

3. Fitbit – Generating Leads & Pipeline with Live Chat

Since 2007, Fitbit has brought technology to health and fitness to change the way people move. With headquarters in San Francisco, Fitbit is now a global brand that was acquired by Google in early 2021.

Fitbit’s digital customer service strategy took shape in 2019, when the B2B side of the business, Fitbit Health Solutions, sought to capture leads that were being missed by relying on a traditional contact form. The delayed responses to the traditional form stunted engagement and a better process was needed.

When considering their options, Fitbit Health Solutions’ digital marketing manager recommended Comm100 Live Chat based on previous experience. Implementation was easy and intuitive for the Fitbit Health Solution team, with Comm100 always ready with fast and effective support during the live chat rollout.

Since Comm100 Live Chat was implemented, Fitbit sourced $6 million worth of pipeline and closed $4 million in revenue.

To date, we have $6 million in opportunities sourced from chat and have closed about $4 million of that. In addition, our sales team loves it. The handoff from support is seamless, it’s brought in great leads, and has led to shorter sales cycles. Comm100 is a great way to interact with customers in real time. Instead of taking 24 to 48 hours to respond to a request for information through our ‘Contact Us’ form, we can get it to the sales team instantly. When we’re more responsive, we’re a lot more likely to close the deal, and do it faster too.

Joanie Gentile, Sr. Business Operations Manage, Fitbit

Auto-translation was a key feature of Comm100 Live Chat for the Fitbit team, allowing them to speak with visitors in any language with automatic chat translation. Canned messages were also highlighted for their ability to keep agents on-message, while Comm100’s reporting capability allows for agent monitoring and real-time metrics.

4. Tangerine – Managing a Surge in Chat Volumes with AI Chatbot

Tangerine is one of Australia’s fastest-growing broadband providers, also providing award-winning SIM-only mobile plans. Since 2013, the business has operated from South Melbourne and has seen a rapidly increasing customer base.

Tangerine’s customer service transformation began in 2015 to improve the experience of both customers and customer support agents. With the introduction of Comm100 Live Chat, Tangerine was able to introduce extended customer support hours and take advantage of the robust reporting tools to monitor individual agent performance metrics like chat duration, first contact resolution rate, and customer satisfaction.

While live chat was a success, the introduction of a new national B2C offering by Tangerine meant that website traffic expanded, and chat requests began to increase rapidly. Between March and May 2019, live chats more than quadrupled, from 500 to 2,227.

To accommodate this increased number of chat requests without expanding the team, Comm100 AI Chatbot was introduced. By December of 2019, 84% of chats were being resolved directly by the chatbot without agent involvement. On some days, the number of chats solved by chatbot rose as high as 91%.

The bot has allowed us to not only effectively manage the increase in chat volume, but it’s also saved us a considerable amount of money by not having to hire a lot more agents.

Richard Branson, COO, Tangerine

5. Cabrillo Credit Union – Increasing Member Engagement with Live Chat

Cabrillo was founded in 1955 to serve the Border Patrol agents in San Diego. Today they continue to serve as the primary financial institution of those employed by the U.S. Border Patrol and other federal agencies in the San Diego area.

Cabrillo’s first step into digital transformation was with Comm100 Live Chat, wanting to provide a more accessible and faster alternative to phone communication for their members. While younger generations were the first to make wide use of the live chat on Cabrillo’s website, they’ve now seen adoption among older generations as they discover the technology and experience its benefits.

In addition to live chat, Cabrillo later introduced Comm100 AI Chatbot in 2020 to answer common questions that took up much of their agents’ time. As well as reducing the burden on their agents, the bot also provides their members with 24/7 support. 30% of chats are now managed by the chatbot, with a 75-58% resolution by the chatbot without the need for human intervention.

The benefits of introducing live chat and a chatbot have been many, including increased engagement year-on-year as live chat has seen increased usage. Members see much faster response times for live chat at only 15 seconds compared to 45-50 seconds for phone wait times. Cabrillo continues to lead in the digital space, and they’ve now incorporated live chat into their online banking platform.

Live chat can be very personal. Often people think you can’t engage the same way you can on the phone, but you can. It’s fun, members like it, and you just have to not be afraid to engage and put a little humor or happiness into someone’s day through the written word.

Kelli Davis, Cabrillo Credit Union

What’s Next?

As we near the end of our exploration of digital transformation in customer service, in part 4 we will look at how to mitigate security threats. That includes examining the risks that come with transitioning your customer service operations into a digital landscape. Not to worry, we’ll be providing best practices and tips that will help you to manage these security threats.

To begin your own success story in customer service transformation, take a look at how Comm100 Live Chat can supercharge your existing channel support. With support for more than 100 languages, Comm100 Live Chat can open your business up to the world. Click here to start a free trial today!

About Kate Rogerson

Kate is the Content Marketing Manager at Comm100. She has extensive experience in content creation for technology companies across the world, including the UK, Australia and Canada. She specializes in B2B messaging, branding and soccer trivia.

Find this article helpful? Don’t forget to share.