How we approached the problem

Initially, we set up an Intercom chat feature as a way for our customers to get in touch with humans as fast as possible. However, with the enormous interest that Rippl attracted, we found ourselves overwhelmed – our small adhoc “customer response team” were working extended hours, and our response time still left room for improvement – it took an average of 52 minutes for our humans to send their first reply to a chat enquiry (of course, this average response time includes enquiries sent at night while we were getting some much-needed sleep!).

We knew we could do better for our customers and our team, and happily we have expertise in Conversational UX, which is any type of user interface that unfolds in a realistic dialogue flow. You’ve probably heard of Conversational AI: bots that learn from their conversations with humans. Those bots fall within the broader category of Conversational UX – just one of many tools out there to make interactions more natural for people. But not every piece of Conversational UX has to be a sophisticated bot that’s plugged into deep machine learning (read: big money). With some clever design, we could make a solution in no time. Intercom provides the foundation – all we needed to do was put on our human-centred design hats and craft something that met our enquirers’ needs.
We started looking at the nature of the questions that were coming in. We found that most of the enquiries were along the same themes – quite literally, Frequently Asked Questions – so we decided to set up some simple FAQs that a chatbot could handle. It’s a stream of real-time data on what your customers care about.