Chilly’s Bottles

The Situation

Chilly’s Bottles is on a mission to accelerate the adoption and everyday use of reusable products. Founded in 2010, Chilly’s Bottles has its finger on the pulse of the times with their view on sustainability and reusable products, selling 9.3 million bottles to date. As a company they experienced a steep growth in 2020, more than doubling in size from 15 to 39 employees. About one fifth of them work in customer service, making it a core part of their business.

Improving customer experience is at the very heart of Chilly’s Bottles: Even though they already have high Trustpilot ratings (4.5 out of 5), they’re always looking for ways to improve their business and prepare for the future – even though there’s not a particular problem to be solved. With their customer-centric approach, they make customer satisfaction and creating an effortless experience top priority by empowering the team to provide feedback cross-departmentally and make continuous improvements based on it.

The Challenge

In 2020 Chilly’s Bottles was not only growing as a business, but they also faced some challenges due to the implications of Covid-19 and Brexit which led to increased delivery demands and ultimately incoming customer service requests. Their customers had lots of queries about deliveries and import charges in particular which made it very difficult for them to stay on top of their backlog. Towards the Christmas season, they also launched a new product, leading to even more customer questions. On average, the customer service team of Chilly’s Bottles was handling 8,000 tickets per month, but this number peaked to 19,000 in December 2020. 

As a consequence, Chilly’s Bottles needed to inform customers on their website of slow response times and were forced to turn off their live chat as they could not cope with the flood of incoming messages. This was particularly difficult from their perspective as queries at Christmas are very time sensitive and live chat would have been ideal for their customers. The service team really felt the stress of dealing with the mounting urgent queries, causing them to spend fewer minutes on emails as they normally would to  deliver the best customer experience possible.

Both wanting and needing to scale up, Chilly’s Bottles had to make the decision to either hire additional staff or invest more in customer service automation.

Even after Christmas, the rush for Chilly’s Bottles and their service team continued until March 2021. Being in this peak phase for longer than the expected time forced them to find a strategic solution for their pressing business needs. Instead of hiring additional headcount, Chilly’s Bottles decided to implement a chatbot to help them scale up their service and manage future demands and fluctuations.

The Solution

Creating an effortless experience for their customers means providing a seamless self-help solution. Within a week of deciding to purchase Dixa’s chatbot, Chilly’s were fully onboarded and launched their Chilly-Bot and only three days after the bot go-live, they saw a 60% decrease in their number of daily live chats.

Fast, reliable, quality customer service in 22 seconds

Chilly’s encourages their customers to self-serve with the chatbot giving them a solution within just 22 seconds, resulting in a CSAT of 70%. Currently, the chatbot handles around 2,500 conversations per month, giving the team plenty of time to tend to cases that really need their expertise and empathy. Each conversation with the chatbot helps to improve the customer experience quickly, through harnessing insights to adapt the bot to customers’ needs.  

Reducing the number of requests gives agents the time they need to focus on complex queries

Chilly’s Bottles’ main platform to communicate with their customers is Zendesk. Integrating the chatbot was a crucial step to accelerate their customer service with the combined power of both softwares to deepen their level of automation. Since the implementation of Dixa’s chatbot, Chilly’s Bottles has seen a decrease in queries to orders by 10%, reducing further every month. The chatbot has successfully deflected simple FAQ tickets as well as more complex queries such as missing item queries, returns, stock inquiries and some faulty item requests.

As well as seeing the number of daily live chats drop by 60%, the ratio of live chats to orders fell to an all-time low of 0.87%. This makes the service team at Chilly’s Bottles feel positive about keeping their live chat open during this Christmas season. Additionally, they have exciting plans for the future of the chatbot: offering it in more languages, adding one of Dixa’s chatbot Functions for re-sending order confirmations as well as integrating it with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.