Case Study Icon Accounting multi-channel AI Automation solution
"A truly customer centric solution, enabling a step change in our customer engagement, during these uncertain times"
Gerard Kiernan, Managing Director at Icon Accounting
The Challenge
Icon Accounting is a leading and one of the fastest growing providers of accountancy and compliance services for independent professional contractors in Ireland. They on-board a significant number of customers per month, with a large amount of traffic coming digitally via their website, portal and other digital channels.
Whilst there has been a healthy customer base so far, Icon identified that they were potentially missing a trick by not having a direct customer engagement channel during non-business hours and weekends.
They were also very aware of some of the redundant and repetitive customer queries being handled by the customer services team and were looking for creative, customer centric automation solutions, in order to drive a long term lean operating model.
The Solution
The AtomX delivery team, in collaboration with Icon’s operational and customer services teams, started by identifying the high impact user journeys and website queries in order to drive early value.
It was an iterative process, including design, conversation capture & structuring, virtual agent training, user testing and included a constant feedback and validation with the customer services agents and SMEs.
One of the key challenge that we faced was to maintain a delicate balance between capturing people’s contact details (direct leads) but not making it a hard requirement for conversations to progress. The chatbots were trained to gently nudge customers whilst continuing to address their queries.
Overtime, we enhanced the engagement experience by continuously improving the conversational responses i.e. NLP and enriching the BOT capabilities with feedbacks, call scheduling, live calling etc, in order to improve “ease of use” and “lead generation” metrics.
As part of the solution, following services were deployed:
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A 24X7, 365 days customer engagement channel.
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A fully trained virtual agent handling upto 84% of queries automatically, with curated smart suggestions to aid customer engagement.
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Ability of the user to schedule a call back or seamlessly transfer to a live agent.
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Automated learning process to continuously update customer conversations.
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Full call centre capability including live chat, alert feature and automatic queue management.
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Automated chatscript access for both virtual and human agents.
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Analytics to understand key trends, top queries, unhandled conversations etc.
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An ability to update and deploy within 2 hours.
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Offered as a SaaS, with a high level of resilience, infrastructure, security and data protection features, critical for an accountancy business.
The Outcome
The customer engagement chatbot generated 21% additional traffic due to non-business hours and weekend coverage.
Due to this increased engagement and a much improved ease of use, the lead generation went up by 83% within the first 3 months of going live.
With a more than 3 folds increase in website conversion rate, this was a great step forward towards customer acquisition and retention targets that Icon had set of itself.
