Implementing artificial intelligence and automated tagging to reduce customer support costs

Client Background

Our client is the world’s largest company by revenue (over $500 billion as per Fortune Global 500 list in 2018) that operates close to 12,000 multifunctional retail outlets in 28 countries under 59 different names.

Business challenge

The billion-dollar conglomerate was struggling with the increasing negative conversations and low-quality responses. For reasons ranging from labor practices to putting smaller stores out-of-business, they had reduced their response rate to 4%. Other challenges include:

Increasing negative conversations online about the brand
High turnaround time and poor-quality responses
Mounting customer care costs due to growing social media conversations about the brand
Customer issues on social media not optimized for resolution

The solution

Identify the happy customers online and engage with them to amplify the positive conversations about the brand
Deploy a team of 60 highly-trained social CRM professionals to handle 10 Million annual social mentions and provide 24/7/365 support in English and Spanish
Implement artificial intelligence and automated tagging programs to prioritize the relevant mentions and close the irrelevant ones, and reduce the human resource costs
Create a social media rule book that enlists the guidelines for resolving customer queries online instead of routing them to the contact center

Results

Garnered more 4 million likes, shares, and comments for the brand
Reduced turnaround time to under 25 minutes and increased the response rate from 4% to 28%
Saved USD 1.4 Million by filtering 8.5x the number of non-actionable posts via enhanced artificial intelligence and $729K via automated tagging structure
3x as many conversations reviewed, tagged and engaged, including owned and earned content

The way forward

Capitalize on the positive brand moments and reduce the percentage of negative sentiments. Continue to take steps towards improving the response rate across all the social pages.