Sustainable, Affordable Transportation
Lime is on a mission to build a future where transportation is shared, affordable, and carbon-free. As the global leader in micromobility, the company partners with cities to provide a clean alternative to cars. Their fleet of electric bikes and scooters has powered more than 250 million rides in more than 200 cities across five continents, replacing 60 million car rides.
Lime strives to make customer support effortless. This means not handing customers off to multiple departments and making it easy for them to self-serve. When there are more complex issues that can’t be resolved with self-service, Lime agents are available to help. Dawn Phelps, Senior Customer Support Content and AI Manager at Lime, says, “Our vision for customer support is simple. We meet customers where they need help and reduce the effort it takes them to get answers.” Dawn empowers teams with tools they need to accomplish that. She oversees all external and internal support content, including the agent knowledge base and help center articles.
ChallengesAutomation to Scale Support Operations
Before Forethought, Lime’s support center functioned like many others: manually. Every support agent handled every type of ticket because there was nothing in place to prioritize and route specific tickets to specific agents. Being a global company, Lime receives support tickets in many different languages. This meant agents often toggled between Google Translate and their cases to respond to common inquiries.
With strong partnerships in the cities they operate in, compliance is important. However, Lime didn’t prioritize support tickets based on their level of criticality. So even if a rider had been in an accident, or a city official messaged about a compliance issue, their tickets were handled in the order they were received. The company wanted to ensure these types of tickets were prioritized, and assigned to agents that were specially trained with information to handle these inquiries.
Lastly, Lime didn’t have a chat widget or any self-service support channels. Support inquiries were received through email, phone, the Lime app, and a web form to be followed up on by support agents. With Lime’s business skyrocketing over the past few years, the number of support tickets they receive has too. Exponential growth and a need to scale led Lime to search for a partner that could help automate support operations.
Solution– Dawn Phelps, Senior Customer Support Content and AI Manager“During the evaluation, there were 4 final contenders. For us, the ROI benefit was the most important factor, and Forethought had the best balance of cost and performance. In some ways there were intangibles too–it felt like we were entering a partnership instead of just being a client.”
Scaling Customer Support Globally
Lime uses Forethought Triage to route tickets to the right agent based on their language. There are dedicated speakers in certain languages, which ensures that support tickets are routed to agents that speak the same language.
In addition, Triage layers the language and category classifications, and works internally to determine different service levels based on severity. Lime has custom tags and triggers set up so that when Forethought predicts a specific language and category, the case is routed to a specific queue based on those tags. Now, support cases are tagged so the most critical inquiries are handled first. For example, a customer’s inquiry about what to do in an accident can now be prioritized over a customer who has a question about a charge from two weeks ago.
With Forethought Solve, they’re able to interpret the intent of a customer’s request, through their chat widget or email, and instantly search their entire database of knowledge articles and previously resolved tickets to provide the most accurate response–all without the help of an agent.
Since Lime provides service across the globe, Solve provides support in multiple languages and countries. There are currently 4 languages supported globally, with plans to add on many more.
Using Workflow Builder, Lime has also built out Robotic Process Automation (RPA) guided workflows. These RPA-guided workflows are automated from beginning to end through pre-set rules. These workflows integrate with internal tools to complete automation tasks around damaged vehicles, charge and payment issues, and receipt questions.
If the customers’ question is complex, they’re automatically routed to the help center web form, which is then passed on to a support agent.
ResultsAutomating to Scale Support
Lime automates roughly 27% of cases that come through email and web channels with Solve. With more than 1.7 million tickets per year across all channels, deflecting simple questions helps save agents’ time in a massive way.
With Triage, Lime automates the case tagging process to predict over 2.5 million tags for language and category. 98% of support tickets are tagged automatically, resulting in a 77% reduction in time to first response. This automation and reduction in response time led to significant cost savings while improving customer satisfaction.
- 27% of cases automated
- 2.5 million tags for language and category
- 98% of support tickets tagged automatically
- 77% reduction in time to first response
Looking Ahead
Looking to the future, Lime is excited about building more workflows with Workflow Builder. The company predicts it will help scale their global support footprint significantly.
– Dawn Phelps, Senior Customer Support Content and AI Manager“I enjoy working with Forethought because we can rely on their expertise around automation to help us scale strategically. Forethought is a real partner that constantly communicates with us and helps us grow our business.”
