How UrbanStems delivers happier customers with Zendesk AI

For flower delivery services, Mother’s Day is the mother of all holidays.

“It’s our Super Bowl,” said Laura McDonald, Director of Customer Happiness at UrbanStems in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “It’s even larger than Valentine’s Day.”

For a brief 10-day window, customer service staff ramps from roughly 16 to 200 people to manage the rush and ensure that flowers reach their destination on time and looking fresh.

It’s a setup with all the trappings of disaster—a 12x increase in staff, heightened customer emotions, and a product that can easily spoil without the right care. But by deploying Zendesk AI this year, the team actually saw customer satisfaction rise.

Boosting efficiency and satisfaction with Zendesk AI

“Prior to using Zendesk, customers had to tell us all the issues [they were experiencing], and our agents had to suss out the root cause of their issue,” said McDonald. “Zendesk gathers everything up front and asks [customers] all the questions we need answered to serve them more efficiently.

It gives us, and the customers, time back.”

For customers, this means less time waiting to speak to a human agent for an urgent issue. Zendesk AI uses sentiment analysis to identify and escalate tickets from angry, frustrated, or worried customers.

“This allows us to surface the customers that need a bit more TLC or a human touch soon, someone who can say, ‘We’ve got this, let’s work through this,’” said McDonald.

For UrbanStems, this means less time spent getting temporary hires up to speed. Zendesk AI helps new agents reach their maximum efficiency levels faster—a must for a short, but intense holiday season.

“It’s very expensive to have [temp agents] operating at less than optimal efficiency for a third of the time they’re working for us,” said McDonald. “Now, with Zendesk, they’re hitting it by their second shift.”

Delivering a more human experience with Zendesk AI

Beyond time savings, Zendesk AI helps the team identify areas of customer friction and frustration so they can continue to improve. By gathering and analyzing customer data, it recently surfaced issues around one such area, order tracking, prompting the executive team to make sweeping changes.

“We were flying blind about this before because it’s difficult for a human to say exactly how angry or frustrated someone is—it’s subjective.” said McDonald. Instead, AI provides a “consistent, measurable way” to find the root cause of friction.

The team also uploaded internal documents to help the bot learn the right brand tone. Now it chats with customers much like its human counterparts would.

For an industry built on recognizing the importance of human relationships, Zendesk AI is making the difference.

“By helping people get to their solutions faster,” said McDonald, “[it gets them] back to connecting with other people in their lives.”

Zendesk AI provides instant value

Just a few months after deploying Zendesk AI, UrbanStems saw a savings of $100K. Zendesk AI is an easy-to-use solution that helps companies recognize instant value and greater customer satisfaction. “Zendesk AI has been critical to our business,” said McDonald. “We’re only three months in and we’ve already seen huge returns.”