To ensure the success of the project and allow enough time for early iterations, the project was started out rather small. Solvemate handled around 40 different solutions per day, offering quick answers to questions like “Where is my order?” and “How can I return merchandise?”.

The chatbot delivered convincing results in less than two months: with careful work on the persona, content and tone of their chatbot, it became clear that their clientele had no qualms about self-serving - or using “a chatbot”.

As a modern tech & ecommerce company - Contorion is always open to brave ideas. Following this early success, the company decided to make the chatbot their first point of contact. This meant erasing the customer service contact information (email & phone) from the website, and making it only accessible in the chatbot. If the chatbot cannot solve the problem, the customer can either pick up the phone - or send an email directly via the chat. This creates an efficient service funnel, where contacts cannot fall through the cracks, and the customers don’t have to hop from one channel to the other.

While this was a bold move, it was definitely worth it: the number of inbound after sales calls decreased by 40% and the time to solution went down to 10 seconds. The increased usage of the chatbot resulted in more and better data, which improved its performance. The shift also provided other useful insights: Contorion learned that over 65% of their customers interact with the chatbot through their desktop devices. That has proved to be valuable information for sales and marketing!

The maintenance of the chatbot has been integrated in the workflow of Contorion’s customer service team from the very beginning. Spending only one hour on maintenance per week, the team enriches and improves the content based on customer feedback and general performance. If customers have new questions, the team can quickly and easily add new solutions. On top of that, the chatbot will also suggest further training on it's own.

The next steps will be adding Solvemate Routines. According to Contorion’s contact tracking, there are approximately 1000 requests every month labeled “Send invoice to customer” - a clear opportunity to automate, and further save costs. All that is required to automate these requests is an "invoice generator" to bridge between Solvemate and Contorion's internal database. After verifying the identity of the customer, the chatbot will generate an invoice that can be directly downloaded from the chat, or sent via email. The customer doesn’t even have to leave the channel!

But why stop there? For ecommerce companies like Contorion, the possibilities with Solvemate Routines are endless. With a few verification steps, the chatbot can change shipping addresses, change passwords and even generate return shipping labels.