Bob Molenaar
Digital Experience Manager, Vandebron
How Vandebron managed 150% higher volumes
Vandebron at a glance
The customer
Vandebron is a green energy company providing households across the country with solar, wind, and bio energy.
The market
Vandebron serves 200,000 energy consumers with customer support in Dutch.
The support team
45 full-time employees receive an average of 5,000 chat requests per month.
The channels
Vandebron agents work across phone, email, and chat, with self-service available to logged-in customers.
The situation
Vandebron wanted to empower its customer support team to meet a surge in requests during the 2022 energy crisis.
The solution
Chat automation that fully resolves 50% of requests and proactively guides customers to self-serve and seamlessly integrates with its CRM platform: Salesforce.
Getting started with Ultimate
Vandebron wanted to make their CX as smooth as possible in the midst of a 2022 surge in energy prices. This included training their customers to self-serve, so they would get what they were urgently looking for faster. Vandebron found Ultimate through their CRM Salesforce's marketplace “Appexchange”, choosing it over the competition thanks to its seamless Salesforce CRM integration.
Automation helped Vandebron and their customers power through the energy crisis, letting them manage 150% higher volumes without needing to scale their team or tech resources. Now, their bot is doing the work of one entire support team.
AI use case spotlight: training customers to “go digital”
- Vandebron customers’ top FAQs revolved around monthly payments, energy usage, meter readings, and changing personal information. Answers to all of them were available on the website, so Bob's team only needed to efficiently triage requests and direct users to the right place to get started.
- Their virtual agent, or bot, identified intents based on natural language processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence. It would then handle simple requests fully, or collect information and create a case in Salesforce to reduce average handling time (AHT) for requests that ended up being escalated to a human.
- Due to the energy crisis, monthly requests increased from 2,000 to 5,000 requests a month, but a 50% automation rate helped the team easily handle more volumes in less time.
AI use case spotlight: monitoring customer satisfaction by measuring NPS
- Vandebron has two ways of asking for customer feedback: random surveys throughout the year and regular feedback check-ins after every conversation, including post-chat.
- Customers can give a star rating following a chat conversation. And the majority responds favorably to it: 50% give the bot 4 or 5 stars on average.
The success story
Scalable
Currently, every season is busy season for Vandebron, so the fact that automation handles the work of an entire additional team is a life saver for them.
Headless
Vandebron chose Ultimate because it was recommended on the Salesforce marketplace, meaning they were able to integrate into Salesforce without creating silos or any interruptions to their existing tech stack.
Customer-friendly
Vandebron carefully tracks their NPS and have seen that customers are taking exceptionally well to automated, 24/7 chat.
Cost-effective
A 50% automation rate is driving down Vandebron's cost per interaction, enabling Vandebron to handle more overall volumes at a lower cost.