How Tomorrow and Ultimate drove sustainable growth, inside and out

Highlights

• Tomorrow received roughly 5,000 customer requests per month via chat, email, and phone
• Before automation, the average handle time was 20 minutes
• AI-powered automation reduced that number by 50%
• Chat requests are now handled by a multilingual virtual agent with a 30% automation rate across all support channels

The Customer: Banking for a greener planet

At Tomorrow, a German fintech startup, sustainability is more than just a catch-phrase. Every card transaction through the app contributes to a greener planet by routing interchange fees to rain forest protection projects. Tomorrow also offers to compensate the average CO2 emission of a person in Germany with their premium bank account.

Since launching its current account in 2018, Tomorrow has gained more than 85,000 customers, with 20 customer support agents handling an average of 5,000 requests per month. Queries are made via chat (45%), email (37%), and phone (18%).

The Situation: Weak intents and technical troubles

When Ron Gerber joined Tomorrow as Head of Customer Support, he was aware of the responsibility that came with building and growing a support team from scratch. Sustainability is a deeply ingrained value throughout the company, so Gerber knew that he wanted to maintain a family-style culture in the team. He anticipated that automated solutions could optimize support processes to keep a growing base of customers happy without overburdening his human agents.

Gerber approached Ultimate because his team was unhappy with their first AI provider: They had been struggling with long outages and imprecise intent management.

“There were a lot of errors, and the system was sending random messages not related to the questions,” recalls Gerber.

The Solution: Multilingual chat automation, powered by NLP

Already impressed with a sales journey that couldn’t have run any more smoothly, Tomorrow collaborated closely with Ultimate’s customer success team to more deeply understand and anticipate their customer’s needs.

For example, Gerber and his team learned to use - and love - suggested answers and assisted replies powered by the AI’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, which made intents substantially more reliable. Long gone were the days of lengthy and unforeseen outages, and the team marveled at a dialogue building interface that was as intuitive as it was visually appealing.

Tomorrow’s virtual agents also seamlessly integrated into Freshchat, the company’s CRM system, and put their multilingual skills to work across all channels to support customers in German and English, with plans to add more European languages in the near future.

The Success: Fulfilling a brand promise with a 50% decrease of Average Handle Times

Tomorrow reached out to Ultimate because they wanted to fulfil their brand promise: Excellent customer support, always and without exception.

Automation helped keep that promise. Virtual agents not only reduced the support team’s average handling time by 50%, they also ramped up overall automation to 30%. This meant Tomorrow’s close-knit team of human agents was able to work healthily, effectively, and sustainably.