How Quizlet Deploys Aisera’s AI Customer Service to Answer the Needs of 60 Million Global Learners
Quizlet has built an educational platform that aggregates professional agents with Aisera’s AI technology to deliver unprecedented support to millions of students, teachers, and anybody who wants to learn. Taking on the vast scope of customer service demanded a support organization that makes critical, high-quality content easily available to users.
Max introduced the webinar, delivering insights on the critical role of the Customer Experience, particularly when a recession may be looming. Forrester conducts an in-depth CX analysis based on 1800 interviews a year, gauging respondents’ sense of what they want and how they feel about the brands they work with. They then create a framework called the CX Index. “It allows us to take the definition of a good CX and boil it into three simple concepts,” says Max.
Effectiveness: When I intend to do something, is it straightforward or a long, arduous ordeal to get what I need?
Ease: Is it simple and intuitive to find the answer I want? (The Customer Effort Score ties really well to that.)
Emotion: How did I feel about the interaction? Was the answer delivered harshly? Did it lack a sense of empathy and human connection?
Everything from going on the web, to reaching customer service, to accessing customer support, to product UI is a part of the Customer Experience. “Customer service is a massive piece of every Customer Experience,” notes Max. “When you get the ‘Three E’s’ right, you win three rewards: customer attention, enrichment, and advocacy, as expressed in Net Promoter scores and other measures.”
Max advises, “If I had one message I want to give you from the webinar it’s this: Things are slowing down; we may be in a recession. This is a time to be very thoughtful about spending.
When times get hard, contact centers often get hit hard. They are a cost center and are looking at it that way. This data reveals that there’s a long-term impact if you don’t get the CX right. There are many ways to make the CX good and save money at the same time.
“The other point is around emotions. When an experience goes well, the customer feels appreciated and valued. If not, they’re disappointed. It’s all very logical, and those are the outcomes.
Conversational AI—Max Shares Powerful Stats
“We asked contact centers where are they going to increase their investment? The #1 place to invest in their contact center is around the chatbot and customer self-service through chat.”
The Quizlet Story: Leading User Operations for Educational Dreamers
Sean illustrated the experience of building the operations team at Quizlet, a global learning platform that helps students practice and master their goals, as well as enabling teachers to prepare materials for exams and certifications. “Whatever they are looking to study, we service a wide variety of teachers and students in the classroom.”
The mission of the user operations team is to understand support on behalf of the 60 million learners who rely on Quizlet every month. Such a motivated audience creates an unrelenting demand for reliable information. “We have to make sure we have the right combination of people, tools and programs in place to run a great support organization,” says Sean.
Sean listed three major foundational precepts underlying the creation and scaling of the support team. “These three guiding principles helped us navigate and set goals in cycles over the past number of years.”
- Self-help or an automated experience is often—but not always—going to be the best or preferred pathway for people to resolve a support need.
- Self-help automation and AI are really here to complement our support team of agents—but not to replace them. Some issues can be resolved by AI, which may be impressive, but eventually will need to be directed to a human to resolve.
- Cost and quality needn’t be at odds—in fact, they cannot be at odds if you are going to really achieve great outcomes for users or customers and the company.
Asked for details on the key pain points that the Quizlet team faced at the outset of their mission, Sean responded that the challenges were fewer pain points per se than a cohort of untapped potential that they saw.
Early on, Quizlet had invested in content strategy within their help center. This comprised FAQ articles that users could research for their answers. “It’s still an important channel for us today,” Sean notes. “But early on, they reached the insight that even with serious investment in high-quality content, users frequently preferred to go straight to a content channel as their ultimate preference.
Also, a significant number of use cases or issues couldn’t be resolved by means of self-help and would always require a degree of intervention on the part of the company. For Sean, this situation raised several points:
Acceptance of the fact that leveraging AI technology will allow for better, easier access to high-quality materials available in the help center.
Acknowledgment that not everything is resolvable through self-help and will eventually result in a contact or a ticket. How do we leverage AI to make those activities faster and more accurate for the users, as well as more scalable and efficient for the company overall? This is an opportunity to leverage high-quality content in a better way.
The Aisera Perspective Keeps CX First
Karthik notes, “The last three years have been an interesting ride. In the beginning of the pandemic, there was a surge of everyone wanting to do self service and acquire the technology at whatever cost. But in the last 3-6 months of a highly inflationary environment, it’s all about “can I do more with less? How do I cut costs?”
The bottom line is that whether in a period of high growth or cost-cutting, you have to start with the CX and keep sight of it. That’s what we are all advising customers not to lose sight of in the long term. The whole point is to focus on customer service and figure out the right kind of automation.
We are finally seeing a shift away from the reactive ticketing, manual-based approach, over to a proactive, AI-powered self-service approach, and that will keep going up.”
Billing and Subscriptions is a popular use case if you want to automate. A second area is Account Management. What we have seen is that AI automation can be implemented across the entire customer journey.
Even where they gave up search and self help, they can see AI as an opportunity for one last look before you submit that case. Once it’s in a case, let’s help make the agents more productive with AI Assist. There are a lot of opportunities depending on where you see the sense of urgency.
Importance of building your advocates for these programs
Engage with executive sponsorship. It’s important to cast a wide net. Think about the people responsible for the overall CX experience start to finish.
Engage with engineering. Let’s get our technology vendors to create high-quality experiences for users and scalable ways to build and sustain over time.
Technology implementation, cost savings, and impact give you the opportunity to build a rich suite of support and help stakeholders make this come to life, including thought partners on the data science side. What opportunities can you solve with AI? Ask other people in your organization.
Aisera Customer Benefits
Conclusion:
Sean adds, “Karthik just shared that keeping an eye on CSAT is critical. Downstream of that we are echoing Karthik again and evaluating efficiency for the end user: How quickly are we resolving their issue? We say quality and cost can work together in a situation like this to optimize around. One rule: put the customer and user first, and the rest will follow.”
