Upgrading the customer support and sales team experience at Ballie Ballerson ?

At Ballie Ballerson, we are all about creating unforgettable experiences for our customers. As a high-energy entertainment venue that utilises multiple channels of communication for customers, including web forms, email, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram DMs, managing customer support messages and booking enquiries has always been a challenge. We were receiving over 500 emails per week and c100 social media DMs, leading to a messy and time-consuming process of sorting through queries about lost belongings and shoe menu recommendations amidst lucrative event booking enquiries.

The prospect of doubling in size over the next year or two made it clear to me that this problem would only worsen and require more and more humans to triage and deal with messages. We knew we needed a better approach—one that would allow our sales team to focus on selling and creating events, rather than getting bogged down in repetitive queries that are actually really easy to answer. That's when we decided to think differently and find a solution that could transform our customer support and sales functions.

How did we approach it?

To find the best approach, we looked beyond conventional hospitality industry practices. Our unique offer and high-value, high-emotion events and celebrations aligned more closely with a luxury holiday booking or a high-value product purchase. Learning from e-commerce, we identified key practices to implement:

1. Separating Sales and Customer Service: We realized that sales and support-related inquiries should be handled by different departments, each with specialized skills. By creating a new team to manage first-contact messages, we effectively delegated non-value-adding tasks, such as simple inquiries about our closing time, to a 1st line support team, allowing our sales team to concentrate on more critical matters.

2. Utilizing Technology Platforms: We adopted Intercom, a centralized messaging platform that brought together web live chat, email, Facebook, and Instagram into one inbox accessible to our entire team. It also gives us scope to add more channels and functionality as we go. It's absolutely a market leader here regardless of industry (in my opinion anyway!)

3. Implementing AI Bot, Juno: By creating and training our AI bot, Juno, with our help centre articles, current email templates, and knowledge from our website, we enabled her to answer over 60% of customer queries independently.

4. Automating Triage and Pre-gathering Information: We developed systems and processes to automatically triage queries to the right team and gather necessary information upfront, streamlining responses and task handling.

Introducing Juno: The Chat Bot Assistant:

Juno, our AI-powered chatbot, has been a game-changer in enhancing our customer support and sales functions. With her ability to provide instant responses, handle common inquiries, and escalate complex issues to human agents, she has empowered our teams to focus on higher-value tasks and increased overall efficiency.

Potential Pitfalls and Challenges:

• Using a partner organisation as our first line of customer support: When it comes to finding the right partners, contractors, or agencies to help take your business to the next level, attention to detail is crucial. I remembered a company I'd worked with in the past for outsourced customer support that was able to solve a similar problem for Ballie even though we work in a totally different industry. There is always the worry that no one can understand your business like you. In reality, even a team member sitting in your office 5 days a week has a learning curve when they start - and there is usually no resilience when they change roles or leave. Working with the right partner has absolutely forced us to review every part of how we do things, levelled up our training ability in these teams, created documentation on every process and method and created resilience for scale or unexpected changes. Once you find the right partner and onboard them well you are set. The proof after all is in the results and our CSAT scores are pretty healthy 12 weeks in.

• Bringing in one of those annoying bots: while Juno has proven to be a valuable asset, we understand that technology has its limitations. We ensure human oversight and intervention when necessary to maintain a personalised touch, especially for more intricate queries or customer-specific issues. It's always only a couple of clicks to speak to a member of the team.

Results and Achievements:

The impact of implementing Juno, 1st line support team and a unified communication platform has been outstanding. Our customer support team is now staffed with fully remote, customer service pros (not sales or marketing people who are lumped with customer service) providing better service and covering more hours. We have achieved faster response times, quicker resolution of issues, and an impressive 66.9% answer rate from Juno for customer conversations. Juno handles 38.1% of conversations entirely, leading to an improved overall customer experience. Our newly established knowledge base has had 6,201 article reads in the last four weeks alone and is absolutely empowering customers to self-serve and find answers more efficiently.

Conclusion:

A smart cookie on our team recently regaled me with the story of the 5 monkeys experiment and it really resonated with me. This wasn't a burning issue, it wasn't going to fall over and break if we didn't tackle this now and no one in the team would have said anything was specifically wrong, but starting with a fresh perspective and not getting caught up with replicating how things work today, looking at how we should tackle this without the constraints of industry and finding excellent technology, like Intercom and Juno has been game-changing for us.

If you are interested in this sort of project, I'm happy to share my experiences with anyone - you can find me here if you'd like to chat more.