Comm100 Chatbot resolves 91% of assigned live chats for Tangerine

Tangerine provides national broadband coverage to consumers across Australia, as well as mobile phone SIM-only plans. Established in 2013, the business operates from South Melbourne and has a rapidly increasing customer base. Tangerine is the sister business to the B2B-focused, More Telecom.

• 91% bot chats resolved
• 97% high confidence bot answers
• 92% proactive chat acceptance

Tangerine began using Comm Live Chat to provide their customers with accessible and instant support. Initially brought in at a small scale as a trial, the improvement it drove in both customer and agent experience soon led Tangerine to increase its number of licenses from three to sixteen.

This allowed Tangerine to offer extended customer support hours and leverage the platform’s robust reporting tools to monitor individual agent performance such as chat duration, first contact resolution (FCR) rate, and customer satisfaction.

Live Chat was running perfectly for their needs and supporting their growing B2B audience. In 2015 Tangerine launched a B2C offering, providing NBN broadband services to Australian consumers nationwide. As a result, their audience base began to expand rapidly and website traffic shot up.

With this new business came a surge in chat requests. In March 2019, Tangerine received exactly 500 chat requests. By May of the same year, this figure had shot up to 2,227. Richard Branson, COO of Tangerine, knew that things couldn’t stay this way, and a chatbot was the obvious answer to their problem:

When Tangerine decided they needed to implement a chatbot, they turned to Comm100 for guidance. As Richard Branson, COO of Tangerine explained:

“Comm100 Live Chat has achieved everything we hoped it would, and more. The reporting tools are excellent and the team has been really helpful in setting up the platform and designing it to our specific needs. This kind of flexibility was key for us, so it was an easy decision for us to choose Comm100’s chatbot.”

With the help of Comm100’s tech team headed by Chatbot Architect Cale Shapera, Tangerine integrated the chatbot with Comm100 Live Chat, training it to target three key customer support areas – technical support, general customer service, and sales.

Tangerine recognized that a large portion of questions being asked on live chat were repetitive, common queries which were taking up a lot of their agents’ time. The bot could quickly and accurately answer these questions, helping to tackle the skyrocketing chat volume, as well as providing their agents with more time to focus on complex issues and ‘VIP’ customers.

In December 2019, 84% of chats routed directly to the bot were resolved without any agent involvement. On some days, this figure rose as high as 91%, representing over 6,400 chats.

Of total live chats, including those routed directly to agents, chats resolved by the bot stood at 62%, representing over 4,400 chats. For questions that the bot cannot resolve, the conversation is automatically transferred to an agent who can read the bot transcript within the same window, ensuring they fully understand the issue and don’t require the customer to repeat themselves.

Because of the bot, Tangerine was fully able to manage the increase in chat volume without the significant added cost of hiring and training more live chat agents.

As the first point of contact for the majority of chats, the Comm100 Chatbot has also helped to reduce wait times from 78 seconds to 54 seconds. With the ability to provide 24/7 support and unlimited simultaneous chats, the bot has also improved acceptances rates. In March, 80% of chats were accepted, and in December with the bot live, this rose to 92%. This 12% increase represents 700 more customers served.

As well as providing faster, more accessible support to its customers, Tangerine also needed a bot that could provide accurate and consistent responses. Of the total questions asked to the bot, 97% of responses are classified as ‘High Confidence answers’, which is the top bracket available and indicates that the response answered the customer’s question correctly. The bot can also understand spelling and grammar errors made by the customer.

With so many chat requests, we needed our bot to handle as many chats as possible. With machine learning, the more you use it and train it, the better it becomes. And it’s worth it. At first, the bot was resolving around 50% of chats, and now on some days it’s handling more than 90% which is exceptional. If the bot can’t resolve the issue, the question immediately feeds into a learning section where I can read it and train the bot accordingly – and now, whenever that question is asked, the bot can handle it.” – Richard Branson

“We worked very closely with Cale, Comm100’s bot architect, to build the bot and set it up for our specific business needs. We were particularly pleased that Comm100 could get it up and running so quickly to help relieve our inundated agents. We had regular calls with the Comm100 bot team — they really went above and beyond to make sure that the bot was accurate. Still now, months after implementing the bot, they get in touch with regular follow-ups. It’s great to work with such a knowledgeable and helpful team.” – Richard Branson

“Our numbers clearly show that our customers prefer live chat over phone. Even when they need to troubleshoot a technical issue, they choose to do this over chat when a call may actually be a little faster. We also have customers who need to use chat because they are deaf or hard of hearing. For us, it’s all about providing our customers with options to engage with us on their terms.” – Richard Branson

Comm100’s AI Chatbot can go far beyond serving as an interactive FAQ – by way of integration it can also execute a range of tasks and actions on behalf of the customer. Tangerine is planning to connect its chatbot with their CRM system so the bot can access the customer’s account information and present it them without the customer having to search for it themselves. The bot will also be able to edit this account information on their behalf, such as password and address.

The bot will even be able to help the customer process payments and change their plan, all within the chat window. Comm100’s platform meets the highest international standards for security and privacy, including SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification, and PCI-DSS compliant, so you can be completely confident that you and your customers’ data are secure.

Tangerine’s need for a chatbot is typical of many businesses whose live chat volumes exceed their agents’ capacity. Traditionally, companies would have no choice but to increase the size of their customer support team, or otherwise accept delivering poor, below standard service to its customers.

In today’s competitive environment, the latter just isn’t an option. Consumers have come to expect, and often demand, the highest levels of customer service, and they will readily swap brands if they don’t receive this.

By building an AI chatbot with Comm100, Tangerine can provide instant and personalized customer engagement while continuing to grow its customer base – all without the added cost of hiring and training more live chat agents. It truly is a win-win.