Modern online retail businesses recognize that superior customer service and support sets them apart in a saturated eCommerce environment. However, as these businesses grow, many don’t effectively scale customer support teams and processes. Without an adequate growth plan in place, companies begin to waste valuable human capital on the tedious task of manually classifying support tickets.
ThredUP, an eCommerce site that sells secondhand women’s and children’s clothing, encountered this exact problem. As the company grew, it began tasking even senior agents with manually classifying more than 1,000 tickets a day. This process involved looking at the tickets, classifying them in one of the company’s 100 case classifications, and routing them to the proper agents for a response.
While the ThredUP leadership team wanted their best people to classify tickets, they also required those same people work on other high-priority, customer-facing tasks. The company knew it needed intelligent automation and smart classification processes in order to make better use of employee resources.
Searching for a viable solution, Chris Harvey, VP of Customer Satisfaction at ThredUP, contacted AnswerIQ to learn more about the company’s automated support application.
Precision Automation and Intelligent Classification
AnswerIQ Support includes intelligent classification, a branch of machine learning that classifies and prioritizes incoming customer service tickets with minimal to no human involvement.
The system utilizes machine learning to identify how past tickets have been classified and routed, learning from the patterns and past actions of human service agents. From that information, it creates a data-driven model that automatically classifies new incoming tickets. As new support tickets arrive, the AnswerIQ Support technology examines the content and classifies attributes by mimicking the human service agents’ actions and logic.
This process frees up agents to solve more complex problems and interface directly with customers, improving customer satisfaction and decreasing response time – all while combating agent burnout.
Complete Automation and Improved Consistency
Since integrating AnswerIQ Support, ThredUP has fully automated its ticket classification system. AnswerIQ Support boasts an 80% match-rate for ThredUP’s ticket classification and the machine learning technology becomes more accurate with time.
Most importantly, ThredUP moved its senior agents away from ticket classification to customer-facing and revenue-generating roles like chat. When customers engage in chat sessions, ThredUP sees up to a three-times higher conversion rate.
What’s more, AnswerIQ Support has increased the consistency of ticket classification. Rather than having 5 to 10 agents independently classifying tickets, AnswerIQ Support allows for consistent classification of tickets within a single resource.
Download our case study to learn exactly how ThredUP intelligently automated ticket classification with AnswerIQ – and how your business can benefit as well.
