Cricut, which makes laser cutting machines for crafters seeking to personalize their designs, faced customer service problems familiar to many retailers. The Cricut CX human agents, who support customers in 30 countries around the world, had to rely on multiple data types kept in siloed systems when serving customers, slowing response times and creating frustration both for themselves and the shoppers they’re trying to help.
By adopting the Zoom CX solutions from Zoom that are capable of combining voice, chat and video in a single platform, including the AI-first self-service Zoom Virtual Agent module, Cricut was able to dramatically improve customer service KPIs, achieving:
- 50% self-service containment rate (i.e. no human involvement);
- 90% reduction in call abandonment rates; and
- 89% reduction in call wait time, from 15 to 20 minutes to under two minutes.
When calls do need to be escalated, the human agent can see the historical context generated by the AI solution, reducing the need for repetition. The AI Expert Assist module within Zoom CX acts to help the human agent by pulling up articles and resources specific to the customer’s inquiry, all in real time. The solution also has been integrated with the Cricut CRM platform, providing customer history to agents so that they know if they’re dealing with a high-value customer.
The “special sauce,” and one that makes sense given Zoom’s history as a visual communications platform, has been the ability to switch easily from a voice call to a video call. This removes another major customer service frustration: trying to describe an item verbally during a call.
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“Cricut is using not just AI but also the video element as part of its CX, which adds an additional layer of personalization,” said Michelle Couture, Global Product Marketing Lead for CX at Zoom in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Giving agents the ability to see and troubleshoot [issues with the Cricut products] in real time has helped cut their average call times and increased first-call resolutions.”
Additionally, call summaries generated by Zoom AI Companion speed up post-interaction work, allowing agents to spend more time helping customers and less time on documentation. The Zoom solution also can perform sentiment analysis in real time, helping agents adjust tone and approach mid-call for better outcomes.
The Case for AI-Powered Solutions in Retail CX
These kinds of advanced CX capabilities are particularly critical in retail, which faces “an extra-complex scenario for handling customers, including high call volumes, lots of inventory, SKUs and orders,” according to Couture. All these factors ramp up during the holiday season, creating a potentially unpleasant experience for both customers and agents.
“CX challenges are really around customer friction,” said Couture. “No one wants to call into customer support to talk to bots, wait in long queues and experience frustration. It’s a time of heightened emotion.”
To help avoid having an interaction go down a bad path, Zoom deploys what it calls “connection-first” AI, designed to help human agents stay both empathetic and accurate. “Connection-first places the importance on the experience, which is all enabled on the backend by AI,” said Couture. “You don’t want to automate these conversations just for the sake of using automation. It’s about being thoughtful about where AI is being deployed, [finding] the moments where it makes sense to automate.”
The AI-powered solution’s ability to provide agents with support in real time has proven particularly helpful to Cricut, she added: “They can source an article about returns and find out whether the inventory [they’re looking for] is available in another location. It can even prompt the agents about specific promotions and value-related discounts, supporting them throughout the process.”
Couture noted that deploying AI-powered CX solutions can have powerful effects beyond the customer service area: “Our customers are being more thoughtful about how to implement AI in the CX journey in ways that make for meaningful change in the organization,” she said. “It needs to be more of an enterprise-wide discussion around modernization, because it’s really touching all aspects of the business.”
