A Global Health & Fitness Subscription Technology Company
iFIT is a global health and fitness subscription technology company that provides unmatched fitness experiences and solutions to its growing community of six million engaged members across 120 countries. iFIT is a technology leader and pioneer in the health and fitness industry, with its industry-leading brands – NordicTrack®, ProForm®, Weider, Freemotion®, and Sweat® – which are powered by the iFIT-integrated health and fitness platform.
At iFIT, excellence in customer support is paramount. For Dustin Auman, Operations Manager at iFIT, providing exceptional customer experiences while being as efficient as possible is the ultimate goal. In Auman’s nearly 7 years on the customer support team, he has created self-serve customer support tools and is currently focused on building out a self-service digital engagement platform.
Challenges– Dustin Auman, Operations ManagerMy goal is to improve our deflection rate as much as possible with chat and email while ensuring our members have a very positive experience. We want to make sure we’re giving our members the tools and information they need to find answers on their own.
Before Forethought, the support organization used a chatbot that wasn’t successful in deflecting chats. It was very manual for the support leadership team to make changes to the chatbot script or workflows. To make any changes, support leaders had to make requests with a technical administrator. This was difficult to maintain and proved to be unscalable.
Operational Ineffectiveness
iFIT needed help maintaining its many help center resources. There were hundreds of training documents and knowledge articles that lived in different systems. Oftentimes, agents didn’t have access to all of the right systems or they needed multiple sets of credentials to gain access to important information.
When members reached the help center, there were hundreds of knowledge articles to sift through. The search function within the help center made it difficult for members to find the information they needed, making it difficult to resolve their issues without speaking with an agent.
There was little data behind the creation of knowledge articles, so the support leadership team would use reason codes to manually categorize each case and read the notes to determine how many support inquiries mentioned specific topics. This meant that someone had to search through more than 10,000 lines of data to pick out key topics before sharing them with one knowledge article writer, which was very time-consuming.
This year more than ever, the support organization has had to be hyper-aware of its efficiency goals. Making decisions about which resources may be helpful to members without clear data was no longer possible.
SolutionNow, iFIT takes advantage of Forethought, the leading generative AI for customer support automation, to delight its customers at every step of the journey. With Solve, Assist, Triage, and Discover, Forethought helps iFIT provide best-in-class customer and agent experiences.
Using Generative AI to Improve Customer Experience
iFIT uses Solve as its chat widget. Solve leverages knowledge bases and pre-built workflows to resolve repetitive tickets through an automated widget in the iFIT help center. Forethought Solve uses generative AI to help build the right chatbot content and workflows, giving iFIT’s customers the answers they need instantly.
With Workflow Builder, a feature of Solve, the customer support team builds automated workflows based on customer intent. It also recommends which workflows to build based on common questions and issues, helping the support engine stay up to date with relevant information. Data-driven recommendations from Workflow Builder help iFIT take the guesswork out of which knowledge articles to build to help its customers the most.
Unlike other chatbots, Solve is powered by Natural Language Understanding, not keywords. It comprehends sentence structure, meaning, synonyms, tone, and nuance to extract the perfect answer from millions of documents.
– Dustin Auman, Operations ManagerSomething I really like about Forethought is that other companies think they do AI, but they’re really AI-driven chatbots. They still make you create workflows from start to finish. With Forethought, the AI knows where the customer needs to go. It makes it quicker, easier, and more clear for customers to engage with us. You feel the difference with their AI–it’s been huge for me.
Triaging Tickets
Triage helps iFIT’s support team accelerate response times by analyzing tickets before handing them off to agents. Triage uses historical data to proactively predict and classify new and incoming support tickets. The iFIT support team then leverages routing capabilities to prioritize and handle tickets without the need to manually triage.
– Dustin Auman, Operations ManagerWhat I like most about Forethought is how little effort it takes me to do what needs to be done. That is because of the incredible support team. The time and effort they’ve put into me being as successful as possible is far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced with a vendor I’ve worked with before or currently.
Surfacing Relevant Information to Agents
With Assist, relevant knowledge articles, past cases, macros, and notes are surfaced directly within Salesforce, iFIT’s helpdesk. When cases can’t be deflected and need the intervention of an agent, Assist provides agents with all of the right resources at their fingertips. Assist also works across channels so iFIT’s agents can support customers via email, phone, and chat.
Instead of having to sign in to multiple systems to find different case information, all of the information the agents need is provided by Assist.
Automated Insight Discovery to Maximize Cost Savings
iFIT uses Discover to further automate its support processes, without sacrificing the customer experience. Discover uses generative AI to uncover insights from past support interactions and recommend workflows and content.
Discover proactively recommends workflows that can be automated to maximize cost savings. The recommendations are provided after recognizing the intent of all tickets iFIT’s customers have logged in the past year.
Based on these recommendations, the support team opted to automate three workflows: “refund requests”, “membership cancellations”, and “equipment isn’t working”.
Results– Dustin Auman, Operations ManagerBefore Discover, we didn’t have a system in place to understand the top drivers on our member center. It was really difficult to understand why or if articles were deflecting chats and emails. Now with Discover, I can easily understand which topics are most common and missing from our knowledge articles, filling in the gaps. It’s so easy to use and having that data gives me confidence that I’m making the right decisions.
iFIT has achieved significant results with its use of Forethought. Now, 33% of chats are deflected via the Solve widget. With 82% accuracy in predictions, Triage helps analyze tickets to route them to the right agent.
Additionally, thanks to Discover, iFIT has realized 3,689 deflections and 436 agent hours saved.
- 436 agent hours saved
- 82% accuracy in predictions
- 33% deflection
- +20,000 instant chat resolutions
- +39,000 emails deflected
Looking Ahead
When thinking about the future, Auman is excited to see how far AI can take the support organization. Using AI to automate even more of what the business does is what gets him most excited.
– Dustin Auman, Operations ManagerThere’s so much power in AI, especially generative AI, and I believe Forethought is at the forefront of that. The future is AI and I’m excited to see where our partnership will take us.
