Create, Grow, and Manage Top-Tier Sports Experiences
Spordle is a leading Sports Management ERP that helps customers create, grow, and manage top-tier sports experiences. The platform helps major sports federations, clubs, associations, teams, leagues, and tournaments to operate efficiently on one Integrated Sports Management Platform. These organizations are also part of the Spordle Network, the largest network of sports websites that reaches millions of unique monthly visitors in Canada.
The customer support team includes Gilles Taillon, Director of IT, and Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at Spordle.
Challenges– Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at SpordleThe goals our customer support team is held to are similar to that of other support organizations: CSAT, deflections, and keeping our knowledge base up to date. These are all paramount.
Difficulty Maintaining Help Center Content
Before bringing on Forethought, Spordle had difficulty maintaining help center documentation that helped train end users on how to best use its products. Without self-serve capabilities, the support team had to focus its time on ticket resolution rather than maintaining an up-to-date knowledge base.
Unmanageable Ticket Volume
Spordle’s business, as well as its support ticket volume, is cyclical. Being a sports management platform, registration at the beginning of a new season is a massively busy time. One of Spordle’s biggest clients, Hockey Canada, recently made a few changes that would significantly increase registrations for its programs.
Last year, registration numbers were so significant that customer support ticket volumes reached an all-time high. The customer support team of three full-time agents and one part-time agent were not able to handle the nearly 7000 support tickets per month. This led to seven or eight other employees transitioning to work as full-time agents, on top of their normal job responsibilities. Those employees were often working 14+ hour days to manage the influx of tickets.
Knowing that ticket volume may increase this year based on an increasing number of registrations, the support team knew it had to make a change.
Solution– Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at SpordleThe team was handling between 350 and 600+ tickets per day. This meant that customers grew impatient while agents worked on resolving tickets from a two-week backlog. We knew we had to make a change to improve our customers’ experience.
Spordle uses Forethought Solve as its chat widget. Solve, powered by SupportGPT™, uses generative AI to automatically serve up accurate, human-like responses to chat inquiries. Solve’s generative AI models are automatically trained on Spordle’s data, allowing it to comprehend sentence structure, meaning, and tone to extract the perfect answer from many documents.
Since Spordle’s business is based in Canada, the chat widget switches seamlessly between providing responses in French and English. With Workflow Builder, built-in generative AI enables Spordle’s support team to build automated workflows that detect customer intent to enable seamless self-service.
Results– Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at SpordleThe addition of SupportGPT has drastically increased case resolutions. We don’t need to put the exact sentence in the workflow anymore, SupportGPT offers up better, more accurate answers.
Since March 1, 2023, Spordle has deflected 21,000 chat inquiries, with an 86% self-serve rate. Within the first week after implementation, over 600 tickets were instantly resolved through the chat widget. Three months after implementation deflected tickets equated to 142% ROI.
- 142% ROI, 3 months post-implementation
- 86% self-serve rate
- 21,000 chat deflections
Future– Kim Thomas, Business Analyst at SpordleSince implementing Forethought, our agents are no longer exhausted from dealing with a heavy volume of tickets. We don’t get negative comments from customers about long resolution times, so it’s made all of our lives much easier.
Looking Ahead
When looking to the future, Spordle is excited to try out more of Forethought’s generative AI capabilities, while expanding Forethought to other areas of its business.
– Gilles Taillon, Director of IT at SpordleI’m excited about the future of AI for customer support and where we can go with that. As we grow the business, we plan to use more AI features to help us scale.
