Case study background
Softorino is a software development company that creates applications of different types for macOS and Windows. Their innovative solutions meet users’ needs worldwide, reaching over 15 million downloads.
One of Softorino’s keys to success has always been the high quality of customer service.
Customer support in a technical and innovative domain requires deep expertise and empathy. Finding professionals who can meet the requirements is challenging, as is the onboarding, motivation, and retention of agents.
Despite these challenges, Softorino has built a strong and competent support team capable of processing up to 350 requests per day.
At the beginning of 2024, the company experienced a significant rise in the number of support requests due to the company’s expansion into new markets. Management realized the need to hire twice as many customer service agents. After assessing the required time and costs, they decided to explore the potential benefits of AI agents.
What is more, the Softorino team was considering an opportunity to enhance efficiency in other departments, the Marketing and HR ones in particular, by providing specialists with an AI solution for customer teams that would help solve daily tasks faster while maintaining quality:
- For the Marketing department, assistance in the content creation and SEO optimization was a priority
- HR specialists expected to obtain a solution that would speed up CV screening and the selection of the most relevant candidates
Is it possible to scale the customer care team on a budget ten times smaller than hiring, onboarding, and retaining a team of agents? Can AI provide your customers with informative, relevant, and precise responses? Can AI be helpful in processing data and making grounded suggestions for decision-making? Is AI able to handle creative tasks related to text generation?
The Softorino case demonstrated that these goals were achievable when clearly defined and grounded in the solution's capabilities, supported by the expertise of the AI development team.
Comprehensive approach to gaining the benefits of AI in customer service
After thoroughly analysing Softorino’s needs, both teams agreed that a comprehensive approach should be applied to the case. AI can be implemented to solve a large number of tasks to deliver the most of AI solutions benefits.
By applying all technology’s capabilities that match the particular business goals, we can multiply the positive effect of the implementation of the solution.
As a result, the decision was made to implement two CoSupport AI solutions in Softorino’s operations — CoSupport Agent and CoSupport BI.
Challenges of implementing AI for customer teams
AI implementation is a challenging task by itself. The reason is the complexity of the technology and the conditions under which it works efficiently (the quality of data for model training, in particular).
In addition, CoSupport AI faced challenges of a more specialized character:
- CoSupport Agent implementation for Zendesk Chat, not emails, which is a more typical task
- CoSupport BI tailoring to the task of content SEO optimization
- CoSupport BI tuning for decision-making and choosing the best candidates after CVs analysis
All three goals were achieved within the time frame between January 12 (project start) and March 1 (AI solutions launch).
Deployment timeline
CoSupport Agent: implementation goals, use cases and deliverables
CoSupport Agent implementation goals
In the customer support realm, the primary goal was as follows: to lay the foundation for seamless scaling of the support team within a reasonable budget and the shortest time frame.
AI allows for easy support team scaling by providing opportunities for response automation. In Softorino’s customer support use case, semi-automation became the optimal solution since the team tended to remain a human agent in a conversation as a decision-maker.
The company had an ambiguous experience related to full response automation in customer service. Six cases of other solutions demonstrated that AI was prone to hallucination. Thus, the team decided to take advantage of partial automation under human control.
As a result, the CoSupport Agent was chosen to meet the following project’s sub-goals:
- Automate response creation process for providing timely and precise answers to support requests
- Implement a solution within a reasonable budget
- Decrease the support request processing time by 50%
One of the key reasons for selecting this product was its ability to provide accurate responses three times faster than ChatGPT.
From a technical perspective, the task was to integrate CoSupport Agent with Zendesk, the CRM system that Softorino's team uses to handle customer support requests.
CoSupport Agent use cases
CoSupport Agent’s tasks focus on providing response suggestions for customers’ requests and improving agents’ efficiency with AI.
Use case 1.
Conversation screenshot
CoSupport Agent responds with close to zero risk of hallucinations. High accuracy is ensured by how the CoSupport Agent is trained. The responses are based on real conversations and nothing except them; thus, the model isn’t prone to “fantasizing.”
Use case 2.
Conversation screenshot
CoSupport Agent mimics human agents’ communication style. As a result, the AI assistant provides empathetic and human-like responses.
CoSupport Agent deliverables
Implementing CoSupport Agent led to a significant improvement in key KPIs.
30% increase in the number of resolved tickets in March
45% faster ticket first response time
53% faster ticket full resolution time
CoSupport BI: implementation goals, use cases and deliverables
CoSupport BI implementation goals
The highest productivity of using AI is achievable when you implement the technology for different customer support use cases. When matching the capabilities provided by AI, different tasks can be handled times faster, starting from text generation to analytical insights derivation.
CoSupport BI completely matched Softorino’s goals in the realm of operational efficiency enhancement:
- To automate content generation and SEO optimization in marketing
- To speed up CV processing by recruiters to find relevant candidates faster
CoSupport BI turned out to be the solution able to handle both tasks.
From a technical perspective, the task was to implement the solution with Slack, a tool that the team used for daily internal communication.
CoSupport BI use cases
The Softorino team uses CoSupport BI for the Marketing and HR departments.
Use Case 1 (related to the marketing team)
CoSupport BI’s scope of work for the Marketing team includes the following tasks:
- Creative content generation (social media posts, email campaigns) based on customers’ feedback
- Content SEO optimization
The result: CoSupport BI provides responses that are relevant in 95% of cases and don’t require editing:
Marketing specialists's feedback
Use Case 2 (related to the HR team)
HR specialists use CoSupport BI to make informed decisions on which candidate best matches the vacancy requirements faster.
The task is handled by AI as follows:
- Sharing with an AI assistant vacancy requirements
- Uploading 10 CVs
- Asking CoSupport BI to choose candidates most relevant to the position requirements
The result: an HR specialist makes decisions about candidates three times faster:
HR specialist's feedback
CoSupport BI deliverables
According to Softorino’s specialists’ feedback, most of them use CoSupport BI daily and find an AI assistant helpful:
- 78% of specialists use CoSupport BI daily
- 56% of specialists state that an AI assistant helps them with all aspects of their responsibilities
- 33% of specialists can’t imagine their workflow without AI now
According to various estimates, the tool saves 8-10 hours per week for 44% of users:
CoSupport BI time savings
Conclusion
The successful implementation of CoSupport AI's solutions has significantly enhanced Softorino's operational efficiency and customer support capabilities. The remarkable improvements in key KPIs and time savings have demonstrated the value of integrating AI into their processes.
As Josh Brown, Softorino CEO says — Softorino plans to further their partnership with CoSupport AI by implementing a third solution, CoSupport Customer.
As demonstrated by the use of CoSupport Agent, AI can deliver accurate answers and be trusted with client communication. CoSupport Customer will enable around 80% automation of responses.
Ultimately, the planned combination of these three solutions will optimize operational processes and ensure a high level of customer service. This showcases the potential of AI for customer teams, enhancing Softorino's competitiveness and laying a solid foundation for business development.
