Boomerang Raises the Bar for Customer Support

Support Is Our Moat, So We Enhanced It

Last month, we launched a completely enhanced support experience across the Boomerang platform, and the numbers moved faster than we expected.

Boo (derived from Boomerang 😉), our new AI support agent, now resolves about two-thirds of all support conversations start to finish, and answers arrive instantly. Chat makes up about seven in ten of our conversations, support now runs in dozens of languages automatically, and our customer experience score sits at more than 80%.

That last number is the one that usually suffers when a company adds AI to support. Here's why we think ours went differently, and why this matters more to us than a normal product update.

The mistake everyone is making

Support is treated as a cost. So when AI showed up, most companies reached for it to take pressure off their team.

You've felt the result. A bot that quotes a help article at you. A loop you can't get out of. A cheerful "was this helpful?" when it obviously wasn't. The company saved money and the customer got a worse experience.

Building a good knowledge base is fine, but it isn't what people need. People need immediate help from something that actually knows their situation.

That distinction became the whole project.

Support isn't a cost center for us. It's the product.

Since the day we started Boomerang, we've told Partners the same thing: when you join, take the lost and found phone number and email off of your website and point your guests to us.

Most of them do exactly that. They take it down.

That's a real thing to hand over. Lost and found support reaches people at their worst moment. They're frustrated, exhausted, sometimes angry, often about something that matters far more than what it costs. How that conversation goes is how your venue gets remembered.

We've never taken that lightly, and we never will.

Which is why a person has always answered

Every support request that has ever come into Boomerang was read properly and answered by someone on our team. That has been true since day one, and it's a big part of why Partners hand us this in the first place.

That standard is the thing worth protecting. And as our Partner list and platform volume grew, more and more guests were waiting in line for one of those careful replies.

We could have protected the standard by adding people and asking guests to wait a little longer. 

We'd rather protect it by making the answer arrive the moment they ask.

So we made it instant

Partners and guests can now chat with us directly inside the product and get answers immediately. Three things make that work.

A real knowledge base. We wrote a new public help center from scratch, now more than fifty articles deep, sitting on top of a much larger body of private guidance that carries the same standards our team has always answered by.

A live connection to our systems. This is what separates Boo from a chatbot. It's wired into our production systems, so it isn't guessing from documentation. It looks up an actual claim, reads its real status, checks the policy that applies to that specific venue, and acts on it. Boo can cancel a claim, confirm a match, explain pickup and return steps, walk someone through shipping, and move a claim filed against the wrong location. It reasons through problems, remembers past conversations, and follows up on its own.

Verification before anything happens. Boo won't act on an email address alone. Before it touches a claim, the person has to prove who they are.

It also works in dozens of languages. A guest writes in whatever language they're comfortable with and gets answered in it, instantly. As we've grown internationally, this stopped being a nice extra and became the whole job. Someone who lost their passport in a country they don't live in should not also have to fight through a second language to get help.

Humans are still one message away

Boo tells guests in its opening messages that they can ask for a person at any time.

Most of them don't. Not because we made it hard, but because they already got what they needed.

We're also seeing something we didn't fully expect. Support volume has grown every week since launch. We think it's because guests can see a chat icon now and get an answer right away. Reaching out takes one tap, at the moment someone is most scared and frantic about something they've lost.

More people getting help, right when they need it most, is exactly the point.

The support our Partners and their guests have come to know is still the same support. It just got a lot faster. And Boo gets more capable every week, all of it going toward the same thing we started with: taking care of your guests at the moment it matters most.

#FoundOnBoomerang

Source: https://thanksboomerang.com/blog/support-is-our-moat-so-we-enhanced-it/