Helpshift Makes an Impression for Chatbooks

Chatbooks provides a mobile app that converts customers’ digital pictures into physical photo books. Founded in 2014, the company, which is based in Provo, Utah, today has more than 1 million customers and 170 employees, nearly half of whom work on its customer service team.

“What we like to say is Chatbooks is like a subscription to your life,” explains Angel Brockbank, director of support at Chatbooks. “It automatically takes pictures from whatever source you connect it to, whether it be Facebook or Instagram or your iPhone…and every 60 pictures that are loaded from that source [are loaded into] a book that automatically gets sent to you.

“The idea for Chatbooks is really that we want to help people hold on to what matters, and we feel like everything is in the cloud nowadays. It helps…for people to be able to hold it physically and be able to recall those important memories in their lives,” she adds

Having previously relied solely on email for customer support inquiries, Chatbooks realized that it needed to meet its customers on their channel of choice. This was especially apparent during the holidays, when the company received four times the usual number of support tickets. With this in mind, the company turned to Helpshift, a customer service platform that, according to its website, aims to “bridge the disconnect between conventional customer service channels like email and phone support and a growing consumer base that lives in a mobile-first, messaging-based world.”

Chatbooks implemented a number of Helpshift capabilities, including live chat, chatbots, and automated routing and ticket assignment. The 70 agents, many of whom work from home, can now respond to customers via email, chat, and the mobile app. Agents can work from a single dashboard and respond to those different channels quicker than ever before, thanks in large part to the chatbot, which is used to collect customer details and a description of the issue before an agent ever gets involved in the conversation. The chatbot’s data collection is also helpful because if a call gets disconnected, the agent has all the information he needs to follow up with the customer.

Equipped with these features, Chatbooks has been able to resolve more than 30 percent more tickets per hour, decrease its average time to response by more than 75 percent, and increase its customer satisfaction score (CSAT) from 4.6 to 4.8 on a five-point scale while simultaneously supporting a growing customer base.

Helpshift also powers the FAQ portion of Chatbooks’ website.

Brockbank praises the live chat functionality in particular. “Our average time for a first response was 18 hours prior to our live chat implementation with Helpshift,” she says. “As soon as we enabled that feature, it went down from 18 hours to four hours on average.

“Our customers are a lot happier with the live chat feature and being able to interact on live chat versus waiting for email, and my team is a lot happier as well because they’re able to finish issues immediately with one conversation rather than going back and forth with the customer waiting for a response.”

And in the event that agents cannot get an issue resolved immediately, they can leave notes within the ticket so the next agent or supervisor can pick up right where the previous agent left off.

Helpshift has also led to an increase in agent productivity and a higher conversion rate.

The Payoff

Since implementing Helpshift, Chatbooks has been able to do the following:

• increase its tickets resolved per hour by more than 30 percent;
• decrease its average time to response by more than 75 percent, from 18 hours to four hours; and
• increase its customer satisfaction score from 4.6 to 4.8.