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Australian training management software provider aXcelerate is all about professional development. Whether it’s delivering top-notch training outcomes for their 1,200+ customers or providing career opportunities for their own employees, the company’s focus is on improving the way people learn and grow. That’s why when aXcelerate’s Board of Directors asked the support team to invest in AI, the team jumped at the chance to enhance their customer experience strategy with new technology.
AI for a human-first approach
They started by looking at deflection tools, but the options on the market didn’t fit in with their human-first support ethos. Because customers came to them with a wide variety of questions, deflection wouldn’t have the impact they needed. Instead, they looked at the metrics that mattered most and worked back to a solution. The team chose to focus on decreasing the time to solve a case and increasing CSAT.
The team turned to Assembled because they had already seen efficiency gains from Assembled’s workforce management (WFM) product. They knew Assembled was built by support, for support teams and decided that Assembled Assist’s human-in-the-loop approach to AI fit perfectly with their human-first approach to providing support.
After a speedy implementation that connected to their existing Zendesk resources, the team started rolling out Assist’s copilot functionality to the team. Within 3 days, agents began to adopt and see value from the tool. The impact was clear and easy to measure: CSAT and QA scores both went up for agents using Assist.
Successfully deploying new tools to a support team can be challenging. Implementing them is the easy part, but getting staff to actually use them, well that is a whole different thing. But not with Assist; our team leapt at the tool because it was cutting edge, fun, intuitive and genuinely made it easier for them to provide a consistently higher level of service."
Ash Warbrook, Support Centre Team Leader, aXcelerate
Faster Onboarding, Smarter Training
Then something unexpected happened. aXcelerate hired a new support agent right after implementing Assist and the agent got to work. Before Assist, training was structured in phases: first, agents completed a number of training exercises which included articles and videos from the knowledge base. This was followed by shadowing other team members and over time they built their way up from answering emails to working live chats to finally graduating to live phone calls. But team leaders saw something different with this new hire. The new hire wanted to get working on emails within a few days of starting and proved they were ready to graduate to live chats and phone calls faster than prior new hires.
It wasn't just a fluke, either. As aXcelerate onboarded more agents with Assist, they found that their onboarding was much faster. In fact, onboarding took half the time, reducing an agent’s time to effectiveness from 8-12 weeks down to 5-6 weeks. Plus, working with Assist was a lot more fun and engaging than relying on training videos and knowledge articles.
In the past, aXcelerate chose to hire people with experience specific to support and contact centres. This limited their hiring pool and slowed down the growth of their team. With Assist, they’ve been able to expand their hiring pool to include candidates with more diverse backgrounds while giving them a tool to help build confidence and effectiveness.
You try to tell new hires that there's no such thing as a silly question, but people can still feel like their questions are silly. With Assist, new hires have a resource that they can ask those questions that they might not necessarily feel comfortable asking a colleague. Maybe there's an acronym that everybody uses and they don't know what that acronym means. Now they can message Assist and they can get the answer they need. It really helps them feel more comfortable in the business earlier."
Casey Watkinson, Support Centre Team Leader, aXcelerate
With a team of confident, efficient agents, aXcelerate can provide their customers with the human-first support they deserve.
From the customer's point of view, they feel like they’re still talking with a person. Although our company has grown significantly over the past several years and we’ve gained so many more clients, we’re able to be a big business with a small business sentiment. Assist helps us maintain that very human interaction."
Casey Watkinson, Support Centre Team Leader, aXcelerate
