When Michael Chen joined premium Australian mattress manufacturer Sealy Posturepedic nearly 7 years ago, centralising the fragmented CX function was his first priority.
Laying the right foundations with the CX team, before introducing process automation tech, was most important.
“People, culture, processes, come first and then and only then the technology. If you have people problems, gaps in your existing teams and culture, AI will only help you to experience those things faster,” says Michael Chen. Sealy’s Head of Digital and CX.
“But if you have helped your team to understand that the technology will help to make them more efficient, that AI is a tool to help them, not replace them, then your CX people will deliver measurably better customer service outcomes.”
Sealy’s AI journey
Sealy’s AI journey began during the Covid lockdowns. Incoming customer calls and messages “skyrocketed” and response times blew out. The Executive Team initially considered hiring more people but movement restrictions meant that was not doable.
“So we landed on tech solutions, including co-pilot agents, that allowed us to do more with our existing team. From there, our vision broadened from just wanting to clear the backlog to creating a solution for our operating model that we can scale up and down as required and make us more efficient,” Chen explained.
“It wasn’t all about what technology are we buying, more about how we can take our team with us on the journey because the CX model that had worked for us for the previous 20 years no longer did. We went looking for a strategic solution that was going work for us for the next 20 years.”
That led Sealy to adopting the Zendesk platform and its co-pilot agents before, very recently, integrating Zendesk’s AI agents into their customer-facing operations.
“Sealy’s initial results with Zendesk’s AI agents are very encouraging. Customer retention is up 100%. Our team capacity is up 30% and we maintained a 90% CSAT score while rolling out AI,” according to Michael.
Judgement and empathy
The judgement, empathy, the high values skills of the human agents, are central to this success, he believes.
“It’s human agents with the right mindset who have the ability to really connect with customers, solve problems, reassure them and build trust. Our people kept our CSAT at 90%. People who can really focus on people and understanding customer needs, they’re going to become more important to us in future.”
The company is still relying heavily upon CSAT to track customer satisfaction. “Immediate data is less important because we have a lot of data points in the past, so we look at the overall trend data going through but its early days for us so we will see,” Chen notes.
Sealy have deliberately pursued AI implementation in small steps, making it easier for the Executive team to measure ROI and manage operational adaptation, including training.
“Start small, don’t do everything at once,” is Chen’s advice. “Focus on good process culture. Launch one or two things. Get your agents comfortable, get the business comfortable, get some runs on the board, this will help you do the rest of the implementation a lot better too,” Michael says.
Sealy are currently using AI agents for chat customer engagement. Voice enquiries are still going to a 100% human contact centre, less than a month into the implementation phase.
Chen appreciated having a technology service partner who played an active role in Sealy’s journey. “When we started deploying AI tools, we wanted to see how they could help us with our existing processes. You want to make sure the tools are helping the human agent. Getting wins at the beginning, gets the human buy-in you need to succeed.”
“Co pilots have many, many capabilities. So what we initially selected was what we thought would benefit the agents. When we launched co pilots, we did not have a clear expectation but with call times immediately reduced by 2-3 minutes this allowed us to redeploy those extra resources. We were able to show the Executive Team ‘yeah we’ve spent this money on technology but we’re going to get a return on it,” Chen recalls.
“With a co pilot, everything is shared with human agents but with AI the machines will respond to customers without a human watching over them. So, for the two weeks of AI implementation, we closely monitored what the AI agents were doing during the day and turned them off at night. We’ve only just moved to leaving the AI agents on over the weekend.”
“It’s constant learning. Constantly adjusting, optimising, the technology while you are learning about it and the technology itself is improving so quickly,” Chen says.
“Initially, implementation is very resource intensive but we are already seeing 40% to 50% of chats are automated which is better than we initially anticipated. If people want to know ‘do you have stock of an item’ or how is their ticket progressing, our AI chatbots can give customers that information right away at 3am. Or they can get that information from our website, whichever they prefer.”
Adopting a hybrid-AI system has also highlighted the importance of having accurate, detailed and up to date information on the website and other company digital information channels that AI agents rely upon to generate answers for customers.