Summary
- SimplyWise is a data aggregator which pulls together info from documents, emails, and web portals to help people optimize their taxes and their healthcare.
- Customer support is central to the SimplyWise offering. Having scaled to over 50,000 users it had become a major struggle to tag and route inbound tickets accurately while keeping first-response times low.
- Lang has taken the strain off SimplyWise’s agents by auto-tagging, routing, and resolving the majority of tickets. First response times have been almost halved, while resolutions are 3 times faster. Plus, the faster throughput caused a 10% conversion boost from trial to paid plans.
Key results
+10% trial account conversion: Lang allows SimplyWise to respond instantly to crucial onboarding questions which has boosted conversion rates by 10%.
38% quicker response time: Lang’s ability to respond to customer tickets automatically has resulted in a 38% reduction in first-response time.
65% shorter time-to-resolution: With Lang able to auto-resolve many routine tickets, SimplyWise has seen median final resolution times fall 65%.
Background
Allie Fleder is a co-founder of SimplyWise. As many founders do, in the early days she found herself spinning a lot of plates — handling Product, Growth, Marketing — and customer support was part of the mix. “I got a really good sense of what the CX role looked like,” she says, “but it felt like I was working 24/7 pretty much.”
As the tickets started to pile up, Allie switched from using her inbox to using Zendesk for support tickets. Initially, this worked well, as she explains, “At some point, I wound up paying for some Zendesk consultants to come in and help me better optimize my platform and for a minute, that was really great.”
But with rapid product development, the changes she’d put in place didn’t solve the problem for long. “My tagging structure basically became obsolete within maybe three or four months of it having been set up. It was kind of expensive to use this firm, and I got to a point where I wondered - am I going to need them to come in every other month to do this?” Allie asked herself.
The challenge
By 2021 Allie had hired her first full-time CX agent to take on the increasing workload, but with the volume of inbound tickets continuing to grow as their customer base approached the 50,000 mark, the same issues were cropping up again.
“She's an incredible customer support agent,” Allie says of her first recruit, “But she wasn't briefed on every single piece of our product that was changing. And she couldn't necessarily always keep up with the tagging because she was busy focusing on the customer experience — that was her priority. So again, the tags kind of fell by the wayside.”
The solution
It was while reaching out online for advice on scaling her CX operations, hiring the right people, and getting automation working that Allie first heard about Lang.
“A couple of people in the Zendesk community referred me to Lang,” she recalls, “I was talking about our issues with tagging and how my automations and my macros and my triggers, everything just kept going wrong as things changed rapidly. They said, ‘Don't spend another minute looking at this, check out Lang, they should be able to help’!”
Realizing the value
“At first, I thought it was too good to be true,” Allie admits, “I assumed it’d be one of those instances where, yeah, there’s an AI tool but I’m going to wind up doing all of the work.”
But her experience couldn’t have been more different, as she explains, “While there was some initial plugging in, I felt like the Lang team held my hand through it and they made it actually pretty easy for me to set it up. Unlike the Zendesk platform, which is so complex to navigate, I find Lang so easy. I go in at least once a month to make small tweaks, to make the tagging and the automations better.”
Then and now - how Lang has impacted CX at SimplyWise
“Lang helps us to deliver real smiling, branded value to our customers,’” Allie explains. We asked her to list a few examples of tangible improvements she’d seen in SimplyWise’s CX function since they adopted Lang.
- Routine interactions are settled faster — meaning fewer complaints.
Prior to Lang:
Around 8% of SimplyWise’s inbound tickets are cancellation or refund requests — but often the messages are incomplete. “90% of the time when they go to cancel, people don’t include the diagnostic information,” Allie explains “Often it might take 24 hours to get that, and then longer for them to follow the cancellation process — so they might get charged in the meantime, and then we’re into another refund cycle.”
After implementing Lang:
Now SimplyWise have triggers set up in Lang so that, as soon as someone writes in to cancel without any diagnostic information, they get an automated response seeking the additional details needed to process their request — cutting the time-to-resolution and avoiding those accidental extra charges.
Reducing the process to a single interaction has made a clear difference. “I can't remember the last time that we had a ticket where someone was like, ‘I'm so furious’, and wrote a negative review — because it took them 3 days to get a refund. Whereas we used to be drowning in them,” Allie recalls.
- Engaging with early-stage app users is easier.
Prior to Lang:
Another frequent topic is people who are using the trial version of the app asking for a demo or a how-to video. It’s an opportunity to convert a customer, but SimplyWise had struggled to respond to these tickets quickly enough, as Allie explains, “If we got back to them five hours later usually they'd figured it out on their own or sometimes just left the app.”
After implementing Lang:
“But now, because we respond instantly with an automation from Lang,” Allie continues, “we never have someone just say thanks. We get people engaging with the videos, then often they have a follow-up question. Our team can actually get into a conversation, understand their needs and be much more responsive than if we lost someone the day they signed up.”
- CX agents are freed up to deal with high-value conversations.
Prior to Lang:
Allie’s CX agents were spending the majority of their time trying to stay on top of high volumes of inbound tickets — and although a lot of the work was relatively simple, it just kept coming. “The rote administrative stuff that we used to waste time on — it was just repetitive, not really inserting value or any positive customer experience,” she remembers.
After implementing Lang:
“One of the powerful things about Lang is being able to triage and automate many of the upfront support interactions,” Allie explains, “So now we’re not spending as much time on that, our agents can focus on conversations that actually matter to customers, and engage more, get more in-depth product feedback.”
- Product development is driven by customer behavior.
Prior to Lang:
SimplyWise recently launched an email receipts feature where users could not only forward email receipts but directly integrate their email accounts. “We were getting so many tickets around it, like feature requests, questions,” Allie says, “I’d read the messages and share screenshots with the team, but of course, I was anchored to whatever the last three tickets I saw were about — especially the bug reports.”
After implementing Lang:
Now, I can just look at the Lang data,” she continues, “It’s so much easier for me to quickly pull the data around email receipts, and then use that to shape the direction we go in. So in that example, we were originally thinking we needed to build for every single inbox. Then from the Lang data we could see the majority of questions were around Gmail accounts. We knew we needed to focus on Gmail first in a way that we wouldn't have if we just relied on engineering or product instincts or intuition!”
Focusing on what matters
For Allie, there are two main unlocks with Lang that have been game-changers. “One is the product roadmap,” she says, “And the other is the improvement to our customer experience, in the app and definitely with support. So it’s allowed us to be responsive, and to focus on things that actually matter — feedback on our products and interactions that customers actually value.”
“It is my favorite of our SaaS subscriptions that we have,” Allie continues, “It's the one thing I'm like, no matter what happens in the budget — Lang is not going anywhere. It has become so core for SimplyWise — so thank you, guys, for building this, I'm so impressed!”
