The Octane AI team recently received powerful news that any business supporting eCommerce would celebrate: an invitation to join the Shopify Plus Support certified technology program.
As the celebrations ignited, so too did some critical questions about how the Facebook and SMS Messaging Platform would have to adapt its business and service model to meet the guidelines and expectations of Shopify Plus and its customers.
One notable update is the service level agreement (SLA): a guaranteed 24/7 support system, ensuring a 30-minute response time for critical priority items and a 6-hour response on urgent items.
Octane AI was looking for a creative solution to meet Shopify Plus requirements quickly, while also setting the stage for a more scalable, efficient, and productive support strategy going forward.
Octane AI turned to Boldr to Meet Shopify Plus Support SLAs
The first step was to set up a team to field off-hour requests. Boldr used its Flex Team to staff outside-of-US working hours — specifically, nights and weekends. It was a cost-effective solution that ensured we had the 24/7 support coverage to provide for Octane AI. With this setup, Boldr helped Octane AI meet the coverage requirements outside of US and European coverage hours in an efficient way.
From Team Flexibility to Intelligent Routing in Intercom
Sticking with a Flex Team was a stop-gap to help Octane AI get up and running quickly. The real next step was customizing Intercom so it would work and fit Octane AI’s brand voice, customer experience standards, and functional requirements.
Specifically, balancing the prioritization and response time needs of Shopify Plus with the various customer touchpoints Octane AI maintained (multiple email addresses in addition to the chat widget), while bringing all inputs into a single queue allowing for escalation based on priority across channel equipping, the Octane AI team and Boldr’s Flex Team (nights and weekends) was able to adhere to the 30-minute and 6-hour response requirements.
Mapping Current vs Ideal Process
Boldr started by digging deep into the current customer submission process to get a holistic view of how customers reach out to Octane AI across all available channels. It was a robust process allowing customers quite a bit of flexibility to engage on their terms and in their preferred channels. A great set up for customers, but a challenging one to coordinate and automate against.
With a deep understanding of the process in tow, Boldr shifted to evaluating all the potential technical solutions to support the ideal process Octane AI preferred. This process took weeks; with each new solution proposed by Boldr, Octane AI was able to see a solution in practice and identify a critical functional, technical, or experiential requirement that sent Boldr back to the drawing board.
Boldr proposed a total of 9 different solutions, including everything from the obvious (Intercom’s tagging and forwarding features), to the slightly more expansive (Gmail’s forwarding options), to the more technically distributed (app integrations and webhooks, like Zapier, Appy Pie, and Automate.io).
Each scenario and each refinement culminated in one main challenge and one powerful solution collaborated on by Megan Berry, VP of Product at Octane AI, and Suneet Bhatt, Boldr President and Executive Sponsor for the account: setting up an auto-response in Gmail to invite customers to respond back and escalate if their true priority wasn’t originally captured.
Google Apps Script and Intercom Working Together
Mark Baek, Customer Success and Service Specialist at Octane AI, Inna Magpantay, Boldr CSM, and Japeth Escaño, Boldr Technology Solutions Analyst collaborated on a final set of options and arrived at the winning approach: creating Google Apps Script automation scripts that could work across Octane AI’s various queues and inboxes, handle auto-responses to clients, while also appropriately tagging and routing responses back to those outbound emails.
Octane AI initially launched this to one customer-facing email address. With everything running smoothly, Octane AI quickly launched the script across all email addresses. The result: a rousing, runaway, routing success, delivered in advance of Octane AI’s launch in the Shopify Plus marketplace. The partnership with Boldr made it possible for Octane AI to be ready at a moment’s notice while also building a solution that would scale longer term.
