Thoughtfully Engineered Consumer Products
Etekcity was established with the goal of enriching the lives of customers across the globe by providing thoughtfully engineered consumer products designed with convenience, simplicity, practicality and value in mind. Today, Etekcity is an international brand owner, serving a diverse e-commerce customer base in home improvement, consumer electronics, and outdoor equipment.
Jubilee Lee, Customer Service Supervisor, manages Etekcity’s support team. Her main focus is making sure the team gets through the holiday season smoothly, while operating as efficiently as possible. She focuses not only on providing excellent service to her customers, but also ensuring support agents have the tools to enable them to do their jobs well.
With high ticket volume, especially during the busy holiday season, Etekcity is focused on providing customers with self-service options.
ChallengesSingle-Touch Tickets & Lack of Consistency
Before Forethought, Jubilee’s team noticed a lot of single-touch tickets that were very simple. Customers would reach out to support with questions about product warranties or manuals that were readily available on the website.
The support team created their own templates that they would send to customers with similar questions. Without easily accessible resources or templates, many support agents relied on tribal knowledge they learned from other agents to respond to cases. This made responses inconsistent from agent to agent, and led to slow response times.
– Jubilee Lee, Customer Service SupervisorI didn’t know to look for a solution. It didn’t cross my mind that our work could be automated instead of manual. Once Forethought reached out, I realized how helpful AI could be to the support organization.
While Etekcity’s help desk had its own built-in chatbot that they considered using, the team quickly found that it was not as customizable as they needed it to be. During the evaluation process, Etekcity considered other chatbots. Ultimately, competitive products seemed more manual to implement, and the team didn’t have the bandwidth to build something from the ground up.
SolutionAutomating Support Processes
Today, Etekcity uses Assist and Solve to reduce agent onboarding time and provide customers with accurate self-service options.
– Jubilee Lee, Customer Service SupervisorThe Forethought platform was easy to stand up and we saw results immediately. There was a great deal of value being added from the time we onboarded.
Reducing Agent Onboarding Time
With Assist, Etekcity support agents access and attach relevant information to support tickets. Assist saves personalized notes and macros, which agents apply easily to cases. The personalized notes function within Assist enables Etekcity’s agents to create, share, and quickly apply commonly used notes templates. The auto-text predictive text has helped agents respond to cases faster.
Etekcity’s electronic consumer products are complex, and many support questions are around product manuals. Now, with Forethought, product manuals are pulled directly from knowledge articles and the website into Assist for agents to easily access. Assist makes it straightforward for agents to find the right answers to support questions, eliminating the need for tribal knowledge sharing and hand-written notes about cases.
Assist has been particularly helpful in reducing agent onboarding time. New hires no longer need a colleague to sit with them all day to be sure they have the right resources in hand. New agents now find answers to their questions by pulling relevant resources with Assist, leading to increased efficiency.
Scaling through Self-Service
Etekcity uses Solve to leverage knowledge bases and pre-built workflows to resolve repetitive tickets through an automated widget. Solve helps Etekcity scale their support operations by resolving customer questions instantly and with accuracy.
By immediately interpreting the intent of a customer’s question, pulling information from previous tickets, the knowledge base, and other data sources, Solve delivers accurate responses quickly. With Solve, Etekcity customers can now check their order status without having to interact with an agent.
ResultsIncreasing Efficiency
With Forethought in place, Etekcity’s customers receive accurate answers quickly, whether or not they connect with an agent.
– Jubilee Lee, Customer Service SupervisorWhat we’re paying for now with Forethought is much less than it would be to add a new headcount on the team. What Forethought has done for our support organization is equivalent to having at least one or two new agents.
Agents rely heavily on Assist to increase their speed in responding to tickets and their productivity. Assist’s use of past cases, knowledge articles, and macros have helped agents respond to more cases throughout the day. Before customers even get to an agent, Solve reduces ticket volumes with a 48% self-serve rate.
- 69.7% reduction in time to first response
- 60% reduction in average time to resolution
- 48% self-serve rate
- 3X increase in ticket resolution
Looking Ahead
In the future, Etekcity plans to leverage additional AI functionality to alleviate all manual support processes. They are focused on providing excellent customer service, without compromising the agents’ experience.
Etekcity looks forward to continuously improving support by adding additional channels, languages, and speed to their organization.
– Jubilee Lee, Customer Service SupervisorI really enjoy working with the Forethought team because of their proactivity in incorporating our feedback into product updates. Forethought’s nimbleness, and ability to pivot with us has been great. With other companies, you’re just sent to the help center, but with Forethought, it’s very personalized.
