&pizza is a gourmet pizza company that serves over 70 locations across the East Coast. Since 2012, the chain’s popularity has skyrocketed, creating a substantial fanbase.
With its popularity and quick growth, &pizza also experienced a measurable increase in customer service demands. This led &pizza to partner with Happy Cog to develop a new, accurate, and cost-effective technical customer support solution — an AI customer support chatbot.
Before partnering with Happy Cog to develop an AI customer service chatbot, &pizza was handling all customer service requests manually via SMS. Customers would text a question to &pizza’s short code number, and a team of live customer service representatives would answer the influx of queries.
Handling customer service inquiries one by one was a challenge for &pizza, especially as their business scaled.
First, the customer service team was fielding every question — no matter how mundane or who it came from. Since there was no technology in place to identify which messages were serious requests, representatives were sometimes wasting time engaging with illegitimate and prank messages.
The team was also looking up every order, making order changes, and processing refunds by hand. While the short code number provided value for &pizza’s customers, the lack of automation was time-consuming for the staff and a labor expense for the business.
Above all, even though &pizza had a dedicated staff of customer service representatives monitoring text messages throughout the day, there was no way to prevent human inaccuracies. For example, there was no solution in place to prevent flawed, delayed, or missed responses due to poor performance, high volumes of inquiries, or problems resulting from multitasking. The inability to monitor quality and manage the rush of customer questions sometimes resulted in customer dissatisfaction.
After dealing with the rising costs and instances of customer dissatisfaction stemming from an outdated, inefficient, and time-consuming customer support process, &pizza knew it was time to hire Happy Cog to develop a custom, out-of-the-box solution.
The continued partnership between &pizza and Happy Cog proved to be a great partnership. Happy Cog’s development team analyzed &pizza’s challenges and presented a blazing new idea to ensure the best customer experience possible in their industry: an AI chatbot that integrates seamlessly with &pizza’s current systems.
The team’s first objective was to solve the customer service challenges for &pizza. In other words, Happy Cog wanted to develop a chatbot that could handle unlimited customer service requests, reduce the need for live agent intervention, improve answer accuracy, and cut costs.
As such, Happy Cog used OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to create a chatbot that filters out spam and malicious messages, answers common inquiries, and can access and understand &pizza’s location and menu information to provide accurate and personalized responses.
For example, the chatbot knows real-time location information, menu details, and calorie counts for every ingredient. With this information, customers can get detailed answers about when a store will be open and how to modify orders according to their dietary needs — all without speaking to a representative.
In the event a customer does need to speak with a representative, the chatbot helps with that too. It’s programmed to recognize and categorize messages based on keywords, so the chatbot knows when to escalate a query to a live representative.
Improving and streamlining customer service is where the Happy Cog team took the development process to the next level. Happy Cog integrated the new chatbot into &pizza’s current ecosystem with retrieval augmented generation (RAG). This AI framework retrieves information from &pizza’s knowledge base and feeds the language models (LLMs) the most updated company data so it generates accurate and personalized responses.
The chatbot uses these tools to understand current order status and answer plain English questions. It also segments users based on past behavior, identifies customers who’ve had prior issues, and recognizes and rewards loyalty members. With this advanced programming, it can also manage refunds, issue special discounts for users who’ve had a bad experience, and answer specific questions about rewards points.
The collaboration between &pizza and Happy Cog and the creation of a highly integrated, multi-functional chatbot has been transformative in improving the customer service experience at &pizza.
Customers now receive instantaneous and accurate responses, whether they have inquiries about menu items, store locations, refunds, or loyalty points.
By automating these tasks, representatives are free to focus more on customers facing actionable problems, enhancing the overall efficiency and responsiveness of the customer service team.
&pizza has also experienced significant cost savings by reducing dependency on live agents, increasing resolution time, and boosting accuracy in resolving customer issues. Now, Happy Cog’s chatbot powers hundreds of conversations while costing only $3-5 each day.
&pizza is ecstatic with the improved efficiency and valuable throughput the new application provides. By marrying extensive customization, integration, and pioneering technology, this solution exemplifies the new standard for the restaurant industry’s customer service.
