It’s our 11th—and final—weekly product release of the year. More to come in January (woot!) but for now, let’s take a look back at some of our favorite Flip updates from 2023:
- Resolve Via MMS
- Resolve Via Ticket
- Attentive Integration
- LLMs Incorporated Via ChatGPT
- Other Integrations We’ve Built This Year
RESOLVE VIA MMS
Our Resolve with MMS feature helps to minimize the back and forth (which nobody loves) when dealing with issues that require images, such as damaged items.
So when a customer calls to report they received a damaged item, Flip lets them know what information is needed to process the refund and then sends the customer a text message with that information.
Once received, the customer then sends the required information and images back, and that information populates a ticket in your helpdesk. That way, all pertinent information about the caller—order number, name, history—are already pulled up for the agent when they go to resolve the ticket and process the refund, reship, or offer a discount to keep the damaged item.
Which means, your agents never even have to pick up the phone. It’s a one-touch resolution that prevents fraud, ensuring a safe and secure process while saving time and effort for all involved.
In addition to using MMS to confirm and resolve damaged item issues, Flip has the capability to request additional info from the caller to resolve incorrect items via MMS as well.
For example…
A customer ordered a Christmas sweater, but they say they received a summer dress in the mail instead. Your inventory and PO says that a Christmas sweater was sent, so you ask the customer for a photo of both the item and the tag.
Aha! Issue discovered: One of your summer dresses has the wrong tag. Now you can let the warehouse know to make sure no other customers get the wrong item. And, you have the information you need to safely resolve it.
More clarity + easier resolution = Fa la la la Flip, fa la la yeah.
RESOLVE VIA TICKET
This year, we’ve created even more ways to resolve a call – some of which may involve training your agents to expect a different (and easier) workflow.
For example, there are several ways callers can cancel an order.
One option asks the customer for any necessary info we don’t already have, then lets an agent follow up asynchronously via another channel – such as email. The caller is then forwarded to Flip’s voicemail, a helpdesk ticket is created, and 3 nice things happen:
- The caller is kept out of a queue.
- Your agent is given some freedom to reply anytime within an expected time you can set for your customers.
- Flip provides the full call transcription in the helpdesk ticket—with all the info the agent needs to know to resolve it—and also offers helpful suggestions on best ways to resolve it.
- These have a 90% automation rate on average, letting your agents prioritize and investigate without keeping your customers on hold.
Wins all around.
ATTENTIVE INTEGRATION
Our recent integration with Attentive has opened up some spectacular possibilities. Here’s how it works:
- Your customer calls and asks where their order is.
- Flip tells them where it is.
- We next offer to text their tracking link, PLUS…
- We also ask them if they’d like to subscribe to your brand’s SMS program (for both transactional and marketing texts).
- Which means they’d receive proactive delivery updates for all of their active orders as well as your marketing offers.
If your customer is calling about WISMO, they’re clearly anxious to be kept informed about when their package will arrive. Offering them the option to sign up for SMS updates just makes sense, and Flip is happy to make it happen.
Your customers get a great experience. Your brand gets SMS subscribers. Holly jolly all around.
LLMS INCORPORATED VIA CHATGPT
Let’s talk ChatGPT. The thing that it, and LLMs more broadly, have technically solved for voice ai automation is the Dialogue Management Challenge. In other words, based on everything the bot knows—the goal it is trying to accomplish—and what the customer actually said last in the conversation…what should the bot say next?
The last generation of bots relied on pre-scripted decision trees – like your classic chatbot flow builder. And the instant someone veered off the happy path, they were lost forever. As we’ve all experienced, there are no such rigid tracks in ChatGPT.
Flip stood up this year to say: death to the flow builder in your customer service bots, and hi there to the era of Generative AI.
LLMs and Generative AI now underpin our Intent Classification Model. This is the point in the call where we’re trying to identify the reason the customer is calling (so we can resolve it for them). Flip has the 200+ most common commerce intents in our classifier.
Sometimes, when we ask the reason the customer is calling, we get an answer that matches up exactly to one of those 200+. But as the number of intents has grown, so too have the number of situations where what the customer says could apply to >1 intent. This is what we call Ambiguous Intent.
We used to have a dozen different ambiguous types (ie ambiguous subscription, ambiguous order, ambiguous returns, etc) that then gave a specific follow up to narrow it down.
Now, we’ve removed the rigid structure and allow our LLM model to determine which intents the customer could mean and what Flip should say in order to disambiguate and get to the right one.
A quarter of all calls are not clear with their intent and with our new LLM-driven model, over half of these people are now making it to their single correct intent. This means we can map less clear intents with a recommendation that matches more often.
Exciting stuff, and more what that came from for the year ahead.
OTHER INTEGRATIONS WE’VE BUILT THIS YEAR
When it comes to new integrations, Flip has been busy-busy in 2023! Essentially, ALL of our returns and subscriptions integrations came to be this year, including:
- Returns > Returnly
- Returns > Loop, deep linking to the returns portal
- For all other returns platforms > Basic handling with SMS and resolve via ticket
- Subscriptions > Order Groove, canceling subscriptions, offering discounts, reading subscription status
- Subscriptions > Recharge, canceling subscriptions, offering discounts, reading subscription status
- Subscriptions > Skio, canceling subscriptions, reading subscription status
- For all other subscription > Basic handling with SMS and resolve via ticket
- Using Helpdesk as OMS (Kustomer, Gladly) – We now have the ability to utilize our existing helpdesk integrations to pull order related information.
- Loyalty platform > Epsilon for account matching
- Oauth to existing helpdesks
- Order Management system > Fulfil
That’s a wrap on this week’s release – and our last of the year! Look for more helpful updates landing in January. And, if you’d like to learn more about what Flip can do for your brand heading into 2024, let’s chat.
