Kotsovolos Improves Support Productivity and Capacity with Comm100 Live Chat and Chatbot

Kotsovolos is one of the leading electrical and electronics retailers in Greece. It started in a small neighborhood store downtown Athens in 1950 and today has a nationwide network of 90 stores, both corporate and franchise, as well as an online store.

32% – queries resolved by chatbot
90% – live chat acceptance rate

Back in 2019, Kotsovolos’ customer support team were inundated with inquiries from their two available support channels – telephone and email. With such high volumes, agents were naturally struggling to keep wait times low, and customer satisfaction high as new inquiries came in at the same rate they were resolved.

This situation was worsened further in March 2020 when a national lockdown was announced in Greece due to the Covid-19 pandemic. With this came a surge in inquiries across both phone and email, putting an even greater strain on the team as they reached capacity.

To handle these high support volumes without having to hire more agents, Kotsovolos looked to other brands to see how they were managing this situation. They immediately found that most websites were offering live chat and recognized that this could be the solution to their problem. They also recognized that live chat was becoming an increasingly popular channel as consumers shift from phone towards digital, real-time support.

After thorough research and demoing, Kotsovolos chose to adopt Comm100 Live Chat. Spyridon Athanaspoulos (Customer Care Manager) at Kotsovolos, explained the three key pillars that drove their decision to partner with Comm100:

1. Value for money with a wealth of features available at a lower price

2. Ease of set up with flexible deployment for their IT team

3. Intuitive interface that was easy for the agents to learn and use.

After weekly meetings with Comm100’s specialists to understand Kotsovolos’ goals, support setup and ensure a smooth launch, Comm100 Live Chat went live on their site.

The results were instantaneous. As soon as consumers had the option of getting support via live chat, phone volumes dropped. This was the exact result Kotsovolos had hoped. Unlike phone support, live chat allows for chat concurrency. This means that agents can handle multiple conversations at one time which dramatically increases agent productivity, empowering them to resolve more queries within the same time frame than phone or email.

However, Kotsovolos knew that this efficiency could be improved even further with automation. With this in mind, Kotsovolos integrated Comm100 AI Chatbot into their live chat software to offer a self-service option to their consumers.

Comm100 AI Chatbot greets all customers on chat, providing them with the option of typing their question or selecting an inquiry category which leads them through a series of workflows. This works perfectly for Kotsovolos’ customer care team as the majority of queries are simple in nature, such as ‘Where is my order’ or ‘I want to return my product’. The chatbot resolves an average of 30-32% of all incoming queries.

By resolving these common questions without any human agent involvement, Kotsovolos’ chatbot has not only relieved pressure off their support agents – it has also enabled them to increase support capacity without increasing team size.

Importantly, it also provides agents with more time to spend on complex queries that need a human touch. This means that consumers who can self-serve with the chatbot receive an immediate response, and those who need human support experience greater attention, time, and lower wait times.

There are two major query types that aren’t resolved by the chatbot. Firstly, for questions that the bot cannot resolve, the chat is directed to a live agent who seamlessly takes over, with visibility into the conversation history. For consumers who indicate they have a sales inquiry, the bot immediately routes the chat to an agent within their sales team to help ensure the purchase is completed. As well as messaging, this team also uses Comm100’s video chat feature to help provide more information to the customer and guide them to purchase. The customer care team also use video chat to provide sign language support to their customers who have hearing impairments.

Kotsovolos had several custom tech requirements which Comm100’s chatbot team developed specifically for their use case, including building the bot in Greek. Despite the required development, Kotsovolos’ chatbot was set up within just three weeks.

“Our relationship with Comm100 is great. Even though we are in different time zones, the communication between us has always been very fast and we feel like Comm100 is there to support us, no matter what we need help with. It’s been a brilliant 3 years, and here’s to many more!”