The COVID-19 pandemic brought new challenges to many businesses. At ECHO Inc., they noticed that people stuck at home began investing in their homes and yards. To invest, many people started buying new lawn equipment, and more people buying lawn equipment led to an increase in customer service requests for ECHO.

ECHO’s customer service footprint at the time had been limited to phone calls, form submissions, and a live chat feature that was buried on their website. They had also spent time building up a knowledgebase with Oracle Service but had struggled to find a way to use it as a support channel. With an increase in volume of these channels due to the pandemic, managing them quickly became a problem. To solve this, ECHO decided to invest in a more efficient support option, a digital assistant, to lead customers to live chat while deflecting simple questions.

The key features of ECHO’s digital assistant are live agent integration with Oracle Service, knowledgebase integration with Oracle Service, and a branded user interface (UI) to live on their website’s home page. With Oracle’s Digital Assistant, these features are mostly delivered with out-of-the-box features. The live agent integration connection is completely delivered with Oracle Digital Assistant to connect with existing chat queues in Oracle Service. Likewise, the knowledge base search uses connections delivered with the platform to search Oracle Service and deliver knowledge articles to the customer. The UI was designed by the ECHO marketing team to meet their branding standards and built using the ODA web SDK.

In the first few months of serving customers, ECHO has seen excellent results from the digital assistant. Launched in May 2021, ECHO has so far been able to deflect an average of 83% of their customer service requests away from live agents. By deflecting these requests and answering customers’ questions through the knowledgebase integration with Oracle Service, ECHO saved more than $28,000 in the first three months of the bot being live on the home page. Not only can ECHO better handle an increase in customer service requests, but they are able to do so without needing to expand their live agent team.  

Even though the digital assistant has been highly successful in its first few months, there is still room to grow this implementation. ECHO has identified multi-turn questions and answers, embedded video responses from the bot, and additional channels, such as SMS as their next priorities for their digital assistant.

If this project intrigues you, check out our available resources. If you’d like to learn more about how a digital assistant could benefit your company, contact Fishbowl Solutions at [email protected] or by submitting the form at the bottom of this webpage.