This is a high-level recap of TheLoops Fireside Chat series, “From Early Adoption To Impact: How Bloomreach Leverages AI to Achieve Endless Efficiency,” featuring Christina Augustine, COO of Bloomreach and our CEO Somya Kapoor. In this blog, you’ll learn how to align support and success while automatically saving both teams hours each week, uncover the best use cases and objectives for AI in post-sales, and review Bloomreach’s actual results from AutoQA, Agent Copilot and risk scoring firsthand. Let’s dive in.
Gone are the days where a Support teams only option is to provide reactive, ‘one-size-fits all’ support. Today, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), Support can now become the frontline of customer success, driving business growth, product adoption and customer loyalty.
AI that specifically mines and contextualizes customer conversations can be instrumental in predicting behaviors that indicate churn and low CSAT or pinpoint upsell opportunities equating to growth.
From signal based sentiment analysis to 100% visibility of Support quality with AutoQA, new AI-driven use cases encourage Support leaders to think more strategically about customer interactions and how they contain insights that Support, Success, Product and the C-Suite can access right away.
To help us explore this new paradigm, we met with Christina Augustine, COO of Bloomreach. For the past two years, she and her globally dispersed Support and Success team have been working with TheLoops to improve processes, agent productivity and bottom line performance. Here we walk you through what she did, why she did it and her advice for leaders at the AI-adoption crossroads.
Transforming Support into the Frontline of Customer Success
The traditional view of Support as a reactive, ticket-closing hamster wheel is slowly being replaced. While many teams are still working to instill agent efficiency across their organization, at Bloomreach this new view of Support came from a top-down directive inspired by AI.
Christy shared, “When we first started thinking about what we wanted to measure, what we wanted to improve and what use cases we wanted to roll out, our vision really started with viewing Support as the front line into customer success.”
For Christy and her team, this shift represents more than an observation; it was the basis for reimagining Support’s role in the customer journey. By positioning Support as the vanguard of customer success while leveraging AI, Bloomreach could tap into a wellspring of strategic customer insights.
Takeaway to consider: a clear vision for AI in post-sales is key. You need to know what you want to achieve and how AI can help you get there. Simply collecting data without a purpose in mind can lead to failure.
The Importance of Focused AI Implementation
As Christy’s clip above touches on, the potential of AI in customer support is vast. She cautions leaders on the cusp of implementation and adoption with a pragmatic warning: don’t try to boil the ocean and don’t deploy AI with unrealistic expectations – AI won’t solve every problem overnight.
The key to successful AI adoption lies in targeted implementation focused on narrow, high-impact use cases. “We started very small,” she recalled during the Fireside chat. “We really started by using AI to assist our agents, providing them with relevant information to help them resolve tickets more effectively.”
Sequentially, Bloomreach then adopted AI-driven tagging, followed by proactive backlog management then risk scoring to help Success predict churn. Each new use case resulted in less manual work for agents, managers, even the success team since insights were pushed back into ChurnZero.
This focused approach generated impressive results. Bloomreach achieved a 37% increase in efficiency through their targeted AI efforts. But perhaps more importantly, this rollout provided the momentum and proof of concept needed to drive further AI adoption across the organization specific to the latest use case: AutoQA. Once deployed, this helped Support Managers go from 10% of tickets analyzed to 100% in a matter of weeks and it saved them endless hours of lagging, limited data analysis dependent on excel sheets.
More On AI’s Role in Empowering Support Teams (And How To Drive Adoption)
One of the most significant impacts of TheLoopsAI within support for Bloomreach has been its ability to improve agent productivity and satisfaction. To move the needle in this arena, Christy emphasizes that you want to ask and answer, “How do you make the support team’s life easier? I’ve never seen a team that was hired to capacity or had idle time on their hands. And yes, AI Agent Copilot will make them be more efficient, but it also makes them more productive and thus happier.”
This focus on agents facing AI has led to tangible benefits.
Christy reports, “We calculated about 8 hours per week that was saved by sharing where the issues were in the system. Better yet, TheLoops AI was also right there within the agents’ workflows–they never had to leave their ticketing solution which is always key to productivity.”
By automating routine tasks and providing agents with AI-powered insights, Bloomreach has not only increased efficiency but also freed up their support team to focus on higher-value activities.
Breaking Down Silos: Sharing Insights Across Teams
One of the most powerful outcomes of TheLoops AI adoption for Bloomreach has been the ability to break down organizational silos and share trends with real-time VOC across teams.
Christy explained, “Leveraging the AI to roll up information to types of tickets that we’re seeing, is there a direction from the latest release that now we’re seeing an increase in tickets in a particular area that we can feed into product and engineering and make the product more reliable or stable, all of these things were lagging before and now we can see them and use this front-line, bottom-line combo to improve our product and revenue faster than ever.”
This cross-functional approach was enthusiastically adopted by the Bloomreach Success team. “From a Success perspective, feeding in this support data into our health scoring,” Christina notes, “allows proactive identification of churn risks and upsell opportunities without any surprises or delays.”
Redefining Support Metrics: From Operational to ROI
Perhaps the strongest impact of AI in support is its ability to shift the focus from transactional metrics to value-driven outcomes.
Read more about this in our Smart Metrics recap blog.
Christy articulates her rationale behind this.
“I can shave ten more seconds off my response time, or I can add 30 more seconds to my response time, but actually get a higher CSAT or maybe identify an upsell opportunity in the moment, because I know what the customer is trying to do. Which would you rather have?”
This move towards a more consultative approach is strengthened by AI’s ability to understand customer sentiment and intent beyond what’s explicitly stated.
Christy explains, “With AI, we’re better able to identify particularly what that customer is trying to get done, and if their sentiment was better.” This deeper understanding company wide allows Support teams to add value in ways that transcend simple problem resolution.
Key Advice for AI Adoption in CX
For organizations starting their AI journey in customer experience, here’s a final recap of Christy’s advice:
- Develop a clear vision: “Definitely get your vision together,” she says. This vision should be customer-centric and align with broader organizational goals.
- Identify team pain points: “Talk as much as you can to your team about what struggles they’re having,” she also suggests. By addressing real pain points, you can drive adoption and demonstrate value quickly.
- Start with simple use cases: “Be very clear of what data sources you need and what are your KPIs for success, and just have them be as clear and as simple of use cases as possible to get the flywheel going,” she recommends.
- Drive agent adoption with positive transparency: While efficiency gains are important, Christy emphasizes the need to focus on upskilling outcomes. “We talked a lot about this being an investment in our team. We didn’t focus as much on reducing resolution times by a specific amount, although we did achieve that. Yes, we became more efficient and productive, absolutely. But our main message was that we’re making an investment in you and in support, and we’re trying to bring you more help.”
The Future of Customer Experience With TheLoops By Their Side
Looking ahead, Christy sees that her partnership with TheLoops AI will also drive improvements in customer satisfaction and reduce churn. “Pretty soon, we’re going to see a number of CSAT metrics coming out of this where we’re leveraging those support risk scores to identify at risk customers,” she predicts.
Moreover, Christy imagines a future where support leaders play an increasingly strategic role in organizational decision-making. “I do think this gives support the opportunity to be more B2C like,” she notes, drawing parallels to the personalized, proactive support experiences common in consumer-facing industries.
While her vision of front-line, bottom-line cohesion remains the same, her tech stack has changed. TheLoops extensibility and low-code/no-code setup allowed for a seamless transition from one SOR to another with Salesforce, ChurnZero, Slack and Skilljar remaining consistent across the tech stack.
Wrapping Up
Christy and her team were very intentional in starting with AI to help agents first, then breaking down organizational silos: both bets which helped Bloomreach unlock new levels of customer satisfaction, employee productivity and business value.
We hope you agree—Christy’s experience at Bloomreach now helps other leaders to have a clearer grasp on best practices. You can follow in her team’s footsteps and achieve similar results with TheLoops AI.
As final words of encouragement, Christy encourages optimism. She and and her team had a lot of start and stops with other AI vendors. However, they stayed at it and deployed TheLoops next with great success.
The same can be said for you and your team. By starting small, addressing real operational pain points, and maintaining a relentless focus on agent efficiency, organizations can navigate the AI revolution swiftly and emerge as category leaders with exceptional CX and operations combined.
After all, in the words of Christy, “If we’re not customer first, why are we doing all of this?”
Interested in watching the entire webinar? Access the recap here.
To learn more about TheLoops, set up a call with our team.
