AGCO Corporation (NYSE: AGCO) is a world leader in the design, manufacture, and distribution of agricultural equipment, from tractors and combine to haying equipment, seeding and tilling implements, grain storage systems, and more. Founded in 1990 in the US, today we work with thousands of distributors around the world for brands including Challenger®, Fendt®, Massey Ferguson®, and Valtra®.
We’re a human-centric business, working through dealers to meet our customers’ wide range of needs. Our goal is to constantly innovate in designing intelligent agricultural solutions to help farmers in their daily work.
Customer service is also an essential touchpoint with our customers and dealers. We saw an opportunity to transform this interaction to make it more efficient. We answered questions – many of them the same, routine questions – via email, phone, or our distributor gateway. We knew a percentage of these we could take off the plate of our 100 – person support team, so they were freed up to answer more complex inquiries while also helping get answers to distributors fast and 24/7. So, working with Persistent, our Digital Engineering partner, we looked at implementing a chatbot for the customer service of our European spare parts department. This was a first for us.
Persistent’s great strength is its ability to simplify highly technical topics and walk in our shoes to understand the business problem before making technical suggestions. We rolled out the chatbot in French, English, and German, using the chatbot from Persistent’s partner Kore.ai. We identified the 30 most common use cases – the most commonly submitted requests, compiled into 22 scripts and implemented for our distributor gateway.
We were pleasantly surprised by the accuracy and speed of answers via the chatbot. It’s intuitive and efficient and answers 80% of the questions asked. It’s a great way to automate mundane but time-consuming tasks, allowing support teams to focus on more complex, higher-value interactions. And if a chatbot can’t answer a question, it’s moved promptly to a customer support person to handle.
The time spent handling common customer support requests was cut by 15%.
Given our success here, we’re next rolling out the chatbot to dealer systems support. Chatbots are a great example of elevating the customer experience through innovation – applying automation to eliminate the lower value interactions but making them fast, personalized, and efficient while enabling our teams to provide a better service and value to our dealers.
Download the case study to learn more about our successful conversational AI implementation.
