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Five years ago, Formlabs was the first to bring high-resolution stereolithography 3D printing to the desktop, in a much smaller and more affordable setup than existing industrial SLA machines. Since then, the Form 2 has become the industry-leading desktop 3D printer, with over 40 million parts printed in the field by engineers, designers, manufacturers, dentists, jewelers, and more.
Formlabs doesn’t just offer a revolutionary product, but also gold standard customer service. Even with accelerating growth, the company has held a firm decision that the quality of customer service will not be compromised. And it’s a smart decision: offering excellent customer service is not simply a question of reputation, but also an important market differentiator from competitors.
Giorgio Baldelli
CX Developer & Analyst, Formlabs
But Formlabs has been growing so fast, their customer service promise has been under jeopardy. As many successful companies before, Formlabs was presented with the tough question: “What to do with their customer service; as the growth continues?”
Formlabs customer service had a variety of big challenges. As the product itself is hardware based and very technical, it presents a unique set of problems. Choosing a classic “chatbot” that uses NLP (natural language processing) - where the user has to type in their questions - would have been far from optimal. The troubleshooting tends to be technical, complex, and with many variables. Just training such a bot would be a nightmare. Furthermore, troubleshooting as a type of customer service request already presents challenges: the bot should ask specific questions, in a specific order, based on what the user has already tried. A chatbot using a static decision tree, simply could not do the job!
Pascal Schreiber
It’s not just about the product itself though, it’s also about the global growth: over 40 million parts have been printed worldwide with Formlabs printers. In addition, the company had very long resolution times, as the number of incoming requests increased every month. While hiring new staff can help, it’s not a simple “out-of-the-box” solution. Training and on-boarding new staff normally takes weeks, and customer service industry is known for its high turnover rate. Selling to global customers also means they need support in different time zones, around the clock - presenting yet another set of challenges.
To adopt a global, 24/7 customer service strategy, Solvemate was an easy choice. The diagnostic, machine learning driven approach Solvemate applies has helped Formlabs adapt to their growth and allow time much needed time for the service agents to focus on relationship-building and upselling.
Implementation was fast: the chatbot went live in only six weeks. Throughout the process, Formlabs engaged with the Solvemate Customer Success Team: if there were questions of confusion, they had the support they needed.
Sévanne Jehanno
Within less than 3 months of going live, Formlabs already achieved a 75% self-service rate. This meant in practice, that 75% of the users who got an answer from the chatbot, did not need to contact customer service afterwards. In total, Solvemate currently resolves 16% of all global incoming requests.
Because of the hardware-based product and troubleshooting as the main use case, time to solution on average is 25 seconds. Formlabs also uses Salesforce as their help desk software, so Solvemate’s Salesforce integration was more than welcome: the chatbot can open new cases in the CRM if needed, and Formlabs will also introduce a Salesforce Live Agent chat handover through Solvemate.
