Mastering Complex Calls: How ezCater Enhanced Customer Service with AI-Powered Tools

In today's contact center landscape, handling complex customer interactions efficiently is crucial. ezCater, the #1 food tech platform for workplaces, faced unique challenges in managing high-stakes, time-sensitive inquiries.

Their contact center, the crucial link between businesses and the vast network of restaurants they partner with, handles complex inquiries. Time-sensitive orders involving multiple parties like customers, catering partners, and delivery services demand agents to coordinate and provide solutions in real-time. Michaela Conserva, Senior Manager of Quality Assurance at ezCater, recently shared insights on how AI-powered tools have strengthened ezCater’s award-winning customer service operations.

The Challenge: Navigating Complexity in Food Service Coordination

ezCater's contact center agents deal with complex scenarios daily. They handle food orders from workplaces, so orders are usually large and high stakes. Customers can be calling about an order for a team meeting of 30, a weekly lunch order to 600 employees, or a breakfast for a board meeting. Agents take orders, make changes, cancel orders, and fix delivery problems all the time – and they need to do it quickly.

Sometimes the agents even have to deal with multiple issues at once. For instance, a customer might call because their order is late and the restaurant forgot a key ingredient. That means coordinating with the delivery driver, the restaurant, and the customer – all within a short amount of time.

Michaela Conserva, ezCater's Senior Manager of Quality Assurance, explains the pressure: "If you order a pizza and it's late on a Friday night, it's one thing, but our customers might have ordered a lunch that may be late for 400 employees. That’s a big deal! They need their food on time, and it’s our job to make sure that happens."

To make matters even more challenging, ezCater's customer service knowledge base is HUGE (more than one thousand individual articles). It's like a giant library with tons of information, and sometimes the agents need to find specific details quickly. "Our knowledge base can be really dense," Michaela says. "It’s filled with detailed processes, sometimes in documents that are over 1,000 words long. Our newer agents are sometimes overwhelmed, trying to find the answers they need in these big documents."

ezCater contact center agents needed a way to manage the complexity, gain more confidence in quickly handling customer calls, and make sure they continue to provide 24/7, award-winning customer service.

The Solution: Harnessing the Power of AI

ezCater set out to find a solution that helped maintain their high level of customer service while at the same time giving their agents the tools they need to handle whatever situations are thrown at them. They found their answer in Level AI, a leading provider of AI-powered tools for contact centers.

Level AI’s suite of tools gave them the solutions they were looking for:

• Agent Assist: ezCater implemented Level AI's Agent Assist, an AI-powered tool that acts as a real-time knowledge guide for agents. It listens to conversations and proactively suggests relevant articles and information from the knowledge base, ensuring agents have the precise information they need to resolve customer inquiries quickly.
  
  This real-time solution eliminates the need for agents to search through lengthy documents, providing them with the right answers within seconds. Essentially, Agent Assist acts as a super-smart cheat sheet that puts the information the agent needs to provide exceptional customer service front and center so they spend less time searching and more time interacting directly with customers.
  
  
• Manager Assist: Manager Assist gives supervisors visibility into the real-time activities of the contact center, providing valuable insights into customer sentiment, potential issues, and even highlights important parts of the conversation. With Manager Assist, supervisors could identify calls where customers expressed frustration or were at risk of churning, allowing them to intervene proactively and provide support to agents before the situation escalated. This gives agents the confidence and support they need to handle tough calls.
  
  
• Auto-QA: Instead of relying on subjective criteria like tone, the Auto-QA tool shifted the focus of quality assurance toward customer experience and solution-oriented metrics. This ensured that the company’s efforts were aligned with delivering positive outcomes for customers.
  

A Symphony of Success

The implementation of Level AI tools enhanced ezCater’s contact center, resulting in:

• Improved Efficiency: Agent Assist, with its real-time knowledge access, helped ezCater improve the day-to-day experience of its agents and customers. Since implementing Agent Assist, ezCater has seen a 13% decrease in its overall call handling time. How?
  
  First, calls started getting answered much faster. Remember all that time agents spent searching through those giant knowledge base articles? Agent Assist helped them find the information they needed in seconds, cutting down on the time it took to handle each call. It was like having a super-fast shortcut that helped agents get to the solution much quicker.
  
  This meant that agents could help more customers in a shorter amount of time. They were no longer bogged down by long calls and could jump right into the next interaction, ready to help another customer in need.
  
• Elevated Service Levels: By automating routine tasks and providing real-time guidance, Level AI empowered agents to focus on more complex interactions and helped ezCater achieve 23% reduction in call hold time during peak lunch hours, with 94% of calls served within 30 seconds.
  
  
• Increased Agent Engagement: Level AI helped ezCater make their agents feel more confident and empowered. Agent Assist and Manager Assist made their jobs easier, giving them the information and support they needed to feel like they were doing a great job. Customer service is a challenging job - and anything companies can do to increase agent satisfaction has massive immediate cost implications (by saving money on recruiting, hiring and training), but also on the customer experience by making sure your best agents stay engaged and feel supported by your organization.

"Our agents are overwhelmingly positive about Level AI. They feel much more supported and confident in their jobs because they have real-time assistance and resources right at their fingertips. Now they don't have to worry about searching through the knowledge base when something goes wrong – they have the answers they need instantly."

A Human-Centric Approach to AI

ezCater’s success with Level AI is a testament to their strategic approach to AI implementation. They saw AI not as a replacement for their human agents, but as a powerful tool to enhance their capabilities. AI was integrated strategically to handle the “heavy lifting” of knowledge retrieval and information processing, freeing up agents to focus on what they do best: building genuine connections with customers, providing empathetic support, and delivering personalized solutions.

ezCater also invested heavily in training for both agents and managers, ensuring that everyone understood how to leverage the AI tools effectively. They prioritized gathering regular feedback, constantly refining and improving the system based on the insights they gained.

At the core of their AI implementation, ezCater maintained a relentless commitment to delivering a consistently exceptional customer experience. This customer-centric focus ensured that AI tools were deployed strategically to enhance personalization, efficiency, and ultimately, customer loyalty.“Level AI is a game-changer compared to other tools we've tried. Some of those tools just didn't work for us and did not give the expected ROI. Level AI is exactly what we needed.”

Advice for Organizations Embracing AI

For organizations considering AI implementation in their contact centers, Conserva advises a thoughtful approach: "Be really thoughtful about the training for both agents and leadership. Explain how they can leverage these tools to enhance their experience at work for successful adoption"

A Recipe for Success

By embracing Level AI’s generative AI-powered solutions, ezCater has set a new standard for customer service excellence in their industry. The company’s journey demonstrates the power of Level AI to enhance contact center operational efficiency, improve customer satisfaction, and foster a more engaged and empowered workforce.

"Our main goal is to keep getting better and better, delivering top-notch service while making things more efficient. That's why Level AI is a perfect fit. It gives our agents the real-time support they need to handle calls more effectively, and it helps us keep our average call times down."ezCater is not just delivering great food, they’re building lasting relationships with customers, and that’s something we at Level AI celebrate.