Hot Wins webinar recap: How Thrasio uses AI and automation to improve the customer experience

Victoria Beverly

June 26, 2024

As a leading consumer goods company serving customers via brick-and-mortar and online marketplaces, Thrasio has a portfolio of almost 200 brands and sees an average of 58K monthly support tickets. All of these tickets contain valuable insights into the customer experience, but leaders at Thrasio need the right technology to extract those insights.

Thrasio is overcoming this challenge by using advanced AI and automation technologies for customer experience improvements, enhanced agent experience, and more. 

Recently, Tethr’s very own Kurtis Hall, Senior Director of Accounts, hosted a webinar with Thrasio’s Gershwin Exeter, Vice President of Global Services called Hot Wins: How Thrasio Uses AI and Automation to Achieve Top 1 Percent Operational Excellence. While Kurtis and Gershwin both sampled hot sauces throughout the interview in the style of the show Hot Ones, attendees learned how Thrasio uses AI to deliver exceptional customer experiences.  Both speakers shared valuable insights into enhancing customer experiences using AI and what trends are going to drive impactful change for organizations everywhere. 

Here are the three key takeaways every CX professional, executive leader, and quality assurance leader needs to know.

What we learned

Enhancing customer experience is a top priority for businesses looking to stay competitive in today's market. 91% of C-suite leaders agree that improvements in EX directly impact their bottom line, while 92% of C-suite leaders agree that CX improvements impact business growth.  According to Salesforce research, if a company’s customer service is excellent, 78% of consumers will do business with them again after a mistake. By leveraging the power of AI and automation, businesses can automate repetitive tasks so frontline agents have more time to spend resolving complex issues, and businesses analyze large sets of data and extract insights into the customer experience.

Thrasio's success story serves as a testament to the potential of these technologies in driving innovation and improving CX.

1. Keep it simple & consolidate technology

One of the standout points from the webinar was the importance of simplicity when dealing with or maintaining technology stacks. Gershwin explained, "In a world where AI is playing a huge role,  it’s imperative that we keep our solutions stack, our tech stack, and our processes very simple so we can drive the right behaviors. We are in a constant state of evolution. Our team is forever looking at our processes to see how we can tweak them, how we can make them better.”

Organizations often struggle with managing multiple technology platforms, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs. Gershwin experienced this firsthand. He stated, "A lot of organizations have competing technologies. They'll have eighteen, twenty [products]. And it's because they're using 5% of this or one feature from here. When I joined Thrasio, they had 66 different tech platforms in play. We're down to six. Once we were able to simplify, consolidate, and drive a bigger use case with all of our tech platforms, it saved us a tremendous amount of money."

By consolidating and simplifying their tech stack, Gershwin’s team at Thrasio not only saved money but also streamlined their operations, making it easier to drive the right behaviors and improve the customer experience.

2. Improve the employee experience for a better customer experience

Happy and empowered employees are better equipped to deliver great customer service, which contributes to higher overall customer satisfaction. 

Thrasio achieved this by making their quality assurance (QA) processes objective and transparent through machine learning and deep learning algorithms to evaluate key points of interest from their customer interactions. When recalling what elements of their strategy impacted agent training and development, Gershwin explained, "By having the machine learning and deep learning algorithms go pick up and evaluate 100% of the interactions, you remove the human emotion [and subjectivity].” Implementing an automated QA platform allowed Thrasio to go from manually reviewing random samples of interactions to using AI to identify key moments and areas of opportunity in all of their customer interactions.

While ingesting some of the hottest hot sauces from the Caribbean, Gershwin continued to share some of his team's biggest improvements:

  • Reducing average first response time from 69 minutes to 1 minute
  • Reducing full resolution time from 97 minutes to 12 minutes
  • Increasing CSAT score from 87 to 97 percent

3. Use predictive CSAT and sentiment analysis

Traditional Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metrics are essential, but combining them with predictive CSAT and sentiment analysis takes customer experience measurement to the next level. Thrasio's innovative approach ensures they stay ahead of customer needs and enhance CX. 

Gershwin explained how Thrasio’s agents became empowered through AI and Tethr’s predictive CSAT.  Every customer support ticket gets a predicted CSAT score, and whenever a ticket gets a predicted dissatisfied score, it goes to a human agent so they can follow up promptly and turn a potentially negative situation around.  “We're constantly using human intellect and artificial intellect simultaneously to drive [the customer] experience.”

Thrasio blends traditional CSAT surveys with predictive AI to continuously train and improve their systems. “We feel it's absolutely imperative to do both. So we, via Zendesk, still do the traditional CSAT [surveys] where we're asking the customer about their satisfaction. We're [also] using predictive AI, and we're blending that against the actual customer satisfaction and we're taking those results, cross-referencing them, and we're using that to continually train the predictive CSAT so that it can become smarter. And it gives our agents a better overall vision or summary of where we're going."

When asked about the power of sentiment analysis to inform agent training and customer experience, Gershwin was very adamant about the necessary role it plays in their current CX strategy. “[Sentiment analysis] is a huge one for us,” Gershwin said. “We want to understand where the sentiment is coming in and how to use that with a predictive CSAT so that we can adjust the sentiment or the tone, potentially, of our answers and drive a better customer experience."

How you can use conversation intelligence and AI to improve CX and operational efficiency

Conversation intelligence platforms are revolutionizing the way businesses approach customer experience improvement and beyond. By leveraging AI and machine learning, contact center and CX leaders can analyze every customer interaction, providing valuable insights that help drive operational efficiency.  Businesses can quickly identify pain points and take action to resolve them, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This allows teams like Thrasio’s to focus on more high-value activities, such as coaching and process improvement.  To get started with conversation intelligence and AI, businesses should look for a platform that offers:

  • Automated analysis of every customer interaction type
  • Easy-to-use dashboards with actionable insights 
  • Proprietary interaction scores based on industry research
  • Integration with existing systems and workflows

By leveraging these capabilities, businesses can unlock the full value of their conversation data and deliver the effortless experiences that customers expect.

Conclusion

The "Hot Wins" webinar with Tethr and Thrasio highlighted crucial strategies for improving customer experiences through AI, automation, and human intelligence. By keeping technology simple, enhancing employee experiences, and leveraging predictive CSAT and sentiment analysis, organizations can significantly elevate their customer service standards. 

Ready to take your CX to new heights like Thrasio? Be sure to watch the full webinar. If you’re looking for an expert-backed step-by-step actionable guide to better CX, read Tethr's latest ebook, How to be a CX Action Hero, for more best practices and tips.

Get the How to be a CX Action Hero ebook
Jump to:

Most popular articles