Göteborg Energi Enhances Customer Experience with Chatbot Ellis

Göteborg Energi is an energy company owned by the City of Gothenburg. It sells and distributes electricity and other services to the second-largest urban area in Sweden. With the help of LeadDesk they were able to automate more than 60% of their online support already during the first month and provide the best possible customer service in more complicated matters.

Need: Göteborg Energi Wants to Make Their Customer Service More Efficient

At the end of 2018, Göteborg Energi started looking for ways to use their customer service agents’ time and knowledge more effectively to solve more complex matters. They chose LeadDesk, a trusted chatbot partner of Göteborg Energi’s live-chat provider giosg, for a chatbot implementation project with the following goals:

• Provide instant, automated answers to commonly asked questions
• Free up customer service agents to solve more complex matters
• Give the chatbot an initial knowledge base using current FAQ pages and chat logs
• Chatbot should direct customers to Göteborg Energi contact form and/or call back when it does not know, or is not allowed to provide an answer and when there are no agents available.

Solution: LeadDesk Chatbot Supports Göteborg Energi’s Customers Through Giosg Live Chat Around the Clock

LeadDesk helped Göteborg Energi create its first digital colleague, Ellis. A selection of Göteborg Energi’s customer service agents became bot whisperers, training Ellis with support from LeadDesk’s customer success team. Chatbot Ellis was trained over the month of March 2019 based on data from giosg’s live chat records.

In April 2019, its first month of operation, Ellis was already able to recognize 75 percent of customer questions. And Ellis is always learning.

Chatbot Ellis transferred approximately 27% of the conversations to his human colleagues during the first month of operation. The average percentage of transferred conversations during the eight first months of operation was 40%.

Linda Hay points out, “We can clearly see that our customers want service from our chatbot but also from our customer service agents. The point is to make the workload more reasonable for our customer service team so that they can provide the best possible service in more complicated matters.”

Results: How Göteborg Energi’s Online Customer Service has Changed Since Chatbot Ellis

Göteborg Energi’s customers often report that both live chat and chatbot are a frictionless way to get answers and information. After Ellis was introduced, the nature of customer service work has changed significantly. 

Now Ellis handles most of the repetitive questions, while its human colleagues now have more time to focus on complex customer service situations, where essential human skills like creative thinking, empathy, emotional intelligence, and life experience are needed.

Following their chatbot’s successful automated support and the increased chat capacity for their customer service team, Göteborg Energi expanded chatbot Ellis to serve customers 24/7 from April 2020 onwards.