Sometimes, you've got to turn things topsy-turvy before you come up with a brilliant idea.
That's what visionary Willi Bruckbauer did with Bora, when he revolutionized kitchen architecture and changed how we move around this living space with a new solution for exhaust hoods.
Along with the innovative brand's incredible success comes the obligation to deliver excellent customer service.
Bora wanted to nail it. However, an immensely increasing volume of customer inquiries and the multitude of processes grew into an even more significant challenge for customer service.
If you know the brand Bora, you know: Exhaust hoods don't have to be loud, nor do they have to hang from the ceiling, where they block your view. By contrast, Bora's state-of-the-art exhaust hoods are integrated directly beside the stove-top. Space-saving and quiet, they pull exhausts from beneath, before smells can spread through the room.
A new kitchen trend
That's how Bora has been redefining the kitchen industry since 2007. With its unique solution for diverse applications, the company has established itself as an international leading and award-winning manufacturer of innovative kitchen exhaust.
Today, Bora sells its products in more than 50 countries, communicates in seven languages, and has grown into a company with 250+ employees. A huge success that also comes with new obligations.
Bora quickly realized: If they want to stay the course of success, the ability to innovate has to go beyond developing new products. Productivity has to grow in additional areas as well, such as in customer service.
A breath of fresh air in customer service
With ever-shortening turnaround times, increasing volume of customer inquiries, international communications and skilled workers' ever-growing workload, Bora faced challenges that pushed customer service to extremes. They exhausted old ways. It was time to try something new. Upon recommendation, Bora tried ThinkOwl — an artificial intelligence-based helpdesk software.
Top challenges
With ThinkOwl's team, Bora identified the four productivity blockers:
- Lack of overview of customer cases, of the volume of inquiries and customer service staff's workload. Outlook and Exchange proved inadequate here.
- Lack of standardization
What's the email about? How urgent is the request? What's the customer status? Every customer care agent at Bora used a different method for handling cases. They were missing a centralized workflow with clearly defined service levels and responsibilities. - The constant switching between systems during case processing.
Multiple apps like email, ERP, team chat, CRM buried the relevant pile of data.
Agents had to switch from one system to another continually. Training new employees was an enormous effort that swallowed resources. Why?
Processes were complicated. - Lack of scalability of individual performance and analysis of essential customer needs. What's the caseload? What's the productivity? Which are the frequently asked customer queries? The team was clueless.
Overview, structure, consistency, intelligent data capture
What Bora was missing was a centralized, internationally oriented case management that could integrate all communication channels and keeps the implementation effort to a minimum.
Bora and ThinkOwl — a compelling match
After trying ThinkOwl, Bora achieved quick results:
With ThinkOwl's AI, customer care agents processed customer cases and data on a shared interface, regardless of whether inquiries were received by email, chat or messenger.
Now the team could see how messages are automatically routed based on the admin roles.
Manual processing time decreased because the AI could automatically capture data from emails and extract information. Now, when you open a customer case, relevant content is displayed directly on the screen. Frequently switching to other systems became obsolete.
Customer care, at every level
Decision-makers at Bora could sense that AI increased their team productivity significantly. They were so convinced that they spontaneously went to implement ThinkOwl fully. This meant that assigning categories (like, to classify customer intents) and creating workflows for the many outlier cases had to be configured and stabilized during live operation.
Today, Bora's newly organized customer service with 28 employees successfully coordinates with specialty departments, retailers and consumers around the world, thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, thanks to ThinkOwl.