Zendesk, Umbraco, Microsoft LUIS & KHAOS Control
Correctly predicts the intention of over 40% customer emails
Processed over 15,000 customer emails in 2020
When you're an inventive company, you want your employees to be spending their time on fresh new ideas, not repetitive email queries. We used a customisable artificial intelligence (AI) driven solution to enable Garden Games customer service agents to spend their time on more creative tasks.
When I saw our customer service team with notes on the desktop ready to copy and paste answers to the most common questions asked, I thought that if we could get a computer to be able to read and identify those common questions then the computer could answer. It sounded simple in my simple brain, after all I had read that AI would change the world and it was already here. The reality is different. There were plenty of 'experts' who could tell me what AI would eventually do, but I could not find real experts who could make it happen today. That was until a mutual connection suggested I talk to Andy.
Co-founder & Director, Garden Games
Garden Games is an ecommerce company who sell and manufacture outdoor garden games and sports equipment via their two online shops:
They use KHAOS Control, a business management solution, to manage all products, orders, and customer related data.
Garden Games employees interact with customers using the Zendesk help desk system, historically spending a lot of time answering simple or repetitive emails.
Garden Games felt that a machine powered by AI could answer these frequent requests. Rock Solid Knowledge coined this solution a “helper bot”, whose task would be to understand and automatically reply to help desk tickets.
The helper bot would work out the crux of the email, finding more information as needed, automatically returning a tailored, user-friendly reply. This allows employees to focus more on complex and creative tasks instead of manual email replies.
After an initial prototyping phase, we are happy to report that we have successfully built and delivered this helper bot. But how does it work?
First, we use Zendesk triggers to send all customer emails to our helper API, which carefully processes the email as follows:
LUIS is where the AI magic happens, so let’s learn more about it.
LUIS is Microsoft’s cognitive service that uses machine learning to understand the intent of a sentence. LUIS can figure out what a customer wants to know, such as their order status or a price.
LUIS also picks out the useful parts of the sentence, called entities. Entities include order numbers, locations, and product names.
LUIS decides the sentiment (positivity or negativity) of each sentence. The helper bot can then adjust the ticket priority.
We discard any non-important intents such as disclaimers and sign-offs. But what if the customer wants to know where their order is, or another answer stored in KHAOS Control?
Since we know what the customer is asking about, we can automatically retrieve this information from KHAOS Control. For example, a customer’s order status, or whether a product is in stock. Previously, agents had to manually check this information.
We developed a sophisticated and secure approach using Microsoft’s Azure Service Bus, ensuring that we didn’t need to add any risk to the customer infrastructure.
The bot now has a full set of intents, entities, an average sentiment, and any extra product or order information. This is all the data it needs to automatically craft a suitable response.
We are an Umbraco Gold Partner and knew how powerful the Umbraco content management system (CMS) would be in enabling agents to help us shape the bot replies.
We built a headless Umbraco site to use as a bot management hub, enabling customer service agents to:
With a fully tailored reply, the helper bot replies to the customer ticket via Zendesk itself. Depending on the Umbraco settings, replies can be public or private notes on the ticket. The bot can also automatically assign the ticket to helpdesk agents depending on the intent, channel, and shop. For example, it can assign purchase orders from Sports Ball Shop on eBay to a specific Zendesk agent if that is the business logic required.
Additionally, if the email is a complaint or very negative, the bot can set the Zendesk ticket priority to urgent. This all works in harmony with any existing Zendesk triggers that the agent has already setup, and according to the negativity thresholds set in Umbraco.
We’re proud to say that our AI helper bot has been live for Garden Games since January 2020, with many successful customer replies. We’ve fine-tuned and optimised it as we’ve learned more about the business domain, and we’re in a place where we have a fully-fledged product that can be customised and rolled out to other customers in the eCommerce space.
Since this launch, we’ve also built another AI-based Zendesk app, AimHappy Lite. AimHappy Lite is a free app that will detect the sentiment of Zendesk tickets and set priority accordingly.
Andy knew what they could do and what they would have to develop, and his honesty convinced me that he could get the job done. Now we have a system that does what we asked, it reads enquiries, answers the ones it can and leaves the people here free to work on the more complex issues or on developing new outdoor toys and sporting play products. Andy and Emma turned out to be real experts at getting things done and the system they developed is like having an extra person here, but one who never takes a day off. It is just as we hoped it would be.
Co-founder & Director, Garden Games
Looking for an AI solution for your business? Perhaps you’re a KHAOS Control or Zendesk user who wants a similar solution to this helper bot? We have a track record in excellent delivery, so we’d love to hear more about your requirements.
We're proud to be a Certified B Corporation, meeting the highest standards of social and environmental impact.
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