Case Study: Culligan Optimizes Customer Service ROI

Following the implementation of Diabolocom generative AI, Culligan has observed a significant optimization of its customer service ROI and increased customer satisfaction, with an NPS now reaching a score of 75.

Presentation

Culligan specializes in water treatment solutions for individuals and businesses. Culligan’s solutions remove all undesirable elements from water, including limescale, pesticides, drug residues and bad taste. Culligan provides alternatives to plastic bottles in over 90 countries around the world.

At the Heart of Culligan’s Strategy Is Customer Satisfaction…

At Culligan in France, there are around 300,000 B2B and B2C customers, with B2C accounting for about 70% of the volume. 200 customer service representatives handle 1,200,000 customer interactions a year. Every day, this represents around 5,000 interactions by email, voicemail or telephone.

The issue for Culligan France was, therefore, the effective management of a very high volume of customer interactions while consistently providing a high-quality customer experience.

Why Does Culligan’s Customer Service Department Have to Deal With Such a High Volume of Requests?

The primary reason for contact is to schedule or change an appointment. Although customers have the option of doing this online, they prefer to speak to an advisor.

This type of request accounts for around 60% of total volume. Other requests concern technical problems, troubleshooting, commercial questions or other needs.

Emmanuelle Duchesne, Director of Customer Experience and Transformation at Culligan France, chose Diabolocom’s generative AI solution to facilitate the processing of requests via voicemail (voice message).

Since its implementation, she has seen a clear improvement in agent and customer satisfaction: processing time of voicemails reduced by 50%.

“Processing time of voicemails reduced by 50% thanks to Diabolocom AI” Emmanuelle Duchesne, Director of Customer Experience and Transformation at Culligan France

… And Employee Satisfaction

The processing of voicemails was a low value-added task for the agents, and represented a real need for optimization for Culligan France.

Customers leave voicemails when they can’t reach customer service during opening hours, or because they don’t have time for a conversation with an advisor. However, voicemails require special treatment: they are often difficult to understand, require time to listen to, specific routing and therefore extra processing time, compared with other communication channels.

Culligan is highly committed to the engagement and satisfaction of its employees, striving daily to enhance their working conditions, particularly by reducing manual tasks associated with customer request processing. Diabolocom’s artificial intelligence solution has proven to be very effective in this regard.

A Solution Adaptable to Existing Environments

Before deploying the Diabolocom solution, Culligan already had business tools in place, including :

Freshdesk: the CRM used by Culligan to manage customer relations
WizVille: measuring customer satisfaction
Servicenow: for internal ticketing
Ringcentral: as an existing telephony solution, integrated with Freshdesk

For Culligan, the challenge was to integrate Diabolocom’s artificial intelligence solution into the existing IT environment in just a few weeks.

The Diabolocom team met these high expectations with generative AIs available via API. The AIs were smoothly installed in just a few weeks, and were easily adopted by Culligan’s teams.

“One of our challenges was to be able to quickly integrate the solution into our customer relations platform and for the teams to adopt it quickly. This proved to be the case, as we deployed very quickly, in just a few days.” Emmanuelle Duchesne – Director of Customer Experience and Transformation at Culligan France

On the other hand, Culligan chose this solution because it offers complete control over sensitive customer data, from operational processing to data hosting. All data is stored by Culligan in its own tools and hosted in Europe.

Reliable, High-Performance Voicemail Transcription

Thanks to Diabolocom’s generative AI, Culligan now benefits from real-time transcription, voicemail synthesis and automatic routing.

Once integrated into the customer relations tool, the solution automatically updates the customer’s ticket with the transcript and summary in the format chosen according to Culligan’s criteria. Agents can simply read the summary of the voice message, rather than spending long minutes listening to it.

Thus, these generative AI functionalities have significant added value for agents:

Rapid integration into business tools: with AI, Culligan can recognize the customer, assign the right agent to his ticket, view the transcript and message summary in just a few lines.

“Diabolocom was able very quickly to provide us with the integration we wanted in our customer relations platform.”

Greater responsiveness: all data is accessible on a single platform for advisors. Their performance is therefore enhanced:

“Diabolocom’s solution has been a game changer for our agents.”

Improved working conditions: the processing stages are streamlined: the agent no longer has to listen, understand and transcribe the customer’s needs, and then transfer the request to another, more qualified agent. Today, 70% of tickets are automatically routed to the right agent.

Reduced resolution time: one of Culligan’s major challenges is the volume of requests, i.e. the ability of agents to process voicemails quickly. As Emmanuelle Duchesne points out,

“With the new, very light treatment process, we’ve saved at least 50% on processing time”.

Refined Customer Satisfaction Analysis With Generative AI

After each maintenance intervention, customers can rate their satisfaction on Wizville. The Diabolocom solution recovers NPS (Net Promoter Score) satisfaction scores and customer verbatim, and integrates them into the customer relations solution.

In the past, Culligan focused on the dissatisfaction and NPS scores of detractor customers. Thanks to Diabolocom’s generative AI, customer verbatims are now analyzed, whether the customer is a promoter or a detractor.

In fact, a satisfied customer’s verbatim may include points for improvement, which must be taken into account by the customer service department.

This has enabled Culligan to improve its customer relationship management and to have more information about the customer at the time of the call or ticket processing: the agent is informed, directly in the business tool, whether the customer is at risk or satisfied.

What’s more, the initial NPS score is refined, i.e. nuanced by semantic analysis of the customer’s comment. All customer feedback is integrated into the CRM to detect at-risk customers, contextualize the customer relationship, feed into reporting and assess any weak signals.

As a result, Culligan improved the quality of its customer service, with a first contact resolution rate of 85%, and increased customer satisfaction by achieving an NPS score of 75, particularly high for the sector.

The ROI observed is indisputable: generative AI both improves customer satisfaction and reduces operating costs.

Other Use Cases Can Be Handled by Generative AI

Culligan is now planning new deployments for the EMEA and US markets. The requirement is slightly different from that of Culligan France: with Diabolocom’s AI, the aim is to understand the customer’s voice message, categorize it, assess the level of urgency, and create the associated ticket in Servicenow (internal ticketing tool for IT support requests).

The agent is assisted by generative AI throughout the production chain, and gains in proactivity.

Culligan France has also already identified other use cases that could be handled by Diabolocom’s proprietary IAs, and has full confidence in the teams. “It’s a real strength of the Diabolocom team to be very responsive and to have a very good understanding of our use cases and our business in general.”

Culligan was won over by Diabolocom’s unique approach to the market, and is very satisfied with the results obtained after just a few months.

Diabolocom’s AI solution is refined for customer relations and adaptable to specific use cases, as Culligan’s example demonstrated.