We’re always looking for new ways to improve our service. This includes constantly revising our software, adding new servers and locations, coming up with new features and constantly asking for feedback from our customers.
We aim to make our software “self healing” meaning it will try everything to get you the best performance and connectivity, but since everyone’s computer is unique, running a unique combination of software, it’s impossible to make things work correctly 100% of the time. When people run into issues, they have to ask us for help.
Unlike most of our competitors, we do all support in-house, utilizing self hosted solutions. All support agents are physically in our office, here in Toronto, and not outsourced minimal wage workers on the other side of the planet who are reading off a script.
Garry is a custom built chat bot running on top of the IBM Watson platform. The same Watson that dominated the best players in Jeopardy, several years ago. While Garry is terrible at Jeopardy, he’s pretty good at providing Level 1 support to millions of users (in most cases). By introducing Garry, we reduced our support ticket volume by over 60%, while engaging 10x as many people as we did before. On an average day, Garry will have 700–1200 unique conversations with visitors to our website. The success rate of an average conversation is over 85%. While 85% is pretty good, it’s not exactly 100%, which is where the humans come in. Up to now, when Garry was not able to provide assistance, he would request that the user to submit a support ticket. A human will then read the chat log, and provide assistance via our help desk. While this is useful, it’s not exactly speedy, especially if you’re having a major issue with our software.
We’ve spent several weeks developing a custom live chat platform that is integrated into Garry, which allows him to escalate the existing conversation to a human in real time, so the customer can get a solution immediately. Here is how it works.
Unlike our competitors, we don’t use 3rd party software hosted in some “cloud” which may harvest your personal data for their own purposes. We do everything ourselves, so you can be sure that your data doesn’t leak into the hands of any other company.
Our goals for the near future include getting the Garry’s success rate to 95%, and providing live human escalation 24/7.
