Aterian Consolidates Disparate Programs on Genesys Cloud

Aterian is a consumer products company that builds and acquires e-commerce brands across multiple categories, including home and kitchen appliances, health and wellness, and air quality devices. The company, which is based in Summit, N.J., sells across the world’s largest online marketplaces, including Amazon, Walmart, and Target as well as its own direct-to-consumer websites. Aterian’s brands include Mueller Living, PurSteam, hOmeLabs, Squatty Potty, Healing Solutions, and Photo Paper Direct.

With such a diverse product mix, the company’s customer service team has several procedures that need to be followed, depending on the product and the customer’s query, says Dan Yawitz, its head of technology. “Our pain point was scaling across all of those channels and diverse product lines. Our journey has always been about evolution. As a fast-growing organization, we needed to scale without losing the connection that defines our brand.”

The issue hit a critical stage in late 2023, according to Yawitz. “We were doing some of [the sales and customer management] through Genesys, some through Zendesk, and some through Dialpad, logging manually to all of those channels, leading to some agent burnout as well as customer reviews that were more negative. The ability to respond to queries within 24 hours had dropped to 11 percent.

“We knew that we needed to consolidate,” Yawitz continues. “We needed a platform that could handle emails and chat that was extensible enough that we could build on it. We have internal systems, but they had to be able to plug into something.”

Aterian sent out a request for proposals, and of all the responses, Genesys offered the broadest set of features through its Genesys Cloud Platform, according to Yawitz. “They also have open APIs and a large internal cloud platform to build things like safety flows and decision trees for certain chats. They gave us a canvas that we could build on top of.”

The next step was to onboard the five different systems that were in fragmented states. That took about four months, and because of the complexity, the time frame could have been longer if not for the previous relationship with Genesys and Aterian integrators who were familiar with the company’s complex workflows, according to Yawitz. The Genesys platform went live in the first quarter of 2024.

Within three months service-level agreement compliance nearly doubled from less than 30 percent to between 50 percent and 60 percent. And with one platform rather than a handful of disparate systems, the total cost has dropped 65 percent.

“We knew that we could do better,” Yawitz says.

Aterian has since digitized all internal PDFs, instruction manuals, and other customer service and employee information, then built a suggested reply capability on the Genesis platform to produce answers for FAQs that can be quickly offered to customers.

Today, nearly half of all interactions are automated, freeing agents to dedicate more time to complex issues and build stronger, more meaningful customer relationships. Customer response times have continued to drop every month, with interaction handling time now down by a quarter, while agent satisfaction has improved by a third.

For agents, the technology summarizes historical details from email, which makes up about 70 percent of all Aterian’s customer interactions. The summarization includes query details, product information, the customer’s tone, and other details to help agents respond in a highly personalized manner.

The improved efficiency has helped Aterian continue to improve its customer service performance while expanding into additional products without having to add agents.

In the coming year Aterian expects to expand the Genesys platform into more channels and retrain the underlying AI to use the best query responses and improve the decisions on when to send customers to human agents, Yawitz says.

“We’re always tweaking that balance between human interaction and AI efficiency,” he says. 

The Payoff

Since consolidating on the Genesys Cloud platform, Aterian has seen the following results:

• handle time has decreased by 25 percent;
• agent satisfaction has increased by 33 percent;
• service-level agreement compliance has gone from below 30 percent to the 50 to 60 percent range, with further improvement expected; and
• cost of platform ownership (one platform instead of five) has decreased by 65 percent.