Zinc: Using My AskAI to reduce support tickets by 68%

Created time

Feb 27, 2024 05:46 PM

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Mike Heap

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Ecomm?

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Zinc used My AskAI to reduce their support tickets by 68% overnight and hit their response time targets for the first time

Zinc is an all-in-one automated employment background-checking platform for the fastest-growing (and hiring) companies in the world.

They set themselves the daunting challenge of improving their CX metrics in 2024, without increasing the resources required and keeping their high levels of customer satisfaction

After adding their My AskAI to their site, their support tickets fell, overnight, with at least 68% of queries now being resolved by AI, without a human and they hit their sub-60 second response time goal

They are now looking at ways they can extend their usage of My AskAI in their business and help their CX team make the most of the time freed up as a result

Zinc AI customer service results on HubSpot at a glance

Fact	Zinc
Website	Zinc
Industry	SaaS, HR tech (employment background checking)
Helpdesk	HubSpot
Support volume	Not published
AI resolution rate	At least 68% of all queries
AI CSAT	Not published (97% CSAT overall)
Time saved	Not published (response time cut to under 60 seconds)
Key features used	Human handover, Custom Answers, Insights
Knowledge sources	12 months of documented support processes
Go-live mode	Direct replies on their site from day one

What does Zinc do?

Zinc enables some of the fastest-growing companies, such as marshmallow, Bolt and sumup, to hire effectively at scale by providing an all-in-one employment background-checking platform and automated checking.

Their offering significantly reduces the time required per employee check, turning what could be weeks of manual verification into a simple, one-click process that can be easily integrated directly with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

As a result of Zinc’s platform candidate experience is also greatly improved through a transparent process where candidates have control over their data, can view the status of their checks in real-time, and can choose to retain or delete their data post-process.

How can we provide the same, or better service, without hiring anyone?

One of the core parts of Zinc’s business is providing background checks for candidates.

Given candidates only do these checks when they change jobs, it isn’t a process that they can “learn” and so often end up having a lot of questions about the unfamiliar process.

Part of Zinc’s Customer Experience team’s job has been to guide them through these checks so the candidates can get their new careers started sooner.

At the end of 2023, the CX team had a handful of key operational metrics they wanted to improve:

Conversations per background check

Cost per check

Time to respond

From reviewing their processes, they realized the team was spending a good portion of their time answering the same, simple questions over and over, negatively impacting the above metrics and making for a lot of monotonous copy and pasting of responses for the team members.

Not only that, but at the end of the year they lost a team member and were wondering how, as a growing business, they were going to live up to their challenge of maintaining and improving their response times and (incredible) 97% CSAT score, while not hiring to fill the gap.

“At the end of last year I challenged Conrad (CX & Support Leader) - how can we provide the same or better service, without hiring anyone?” - Sam

So they started looking to AI to see if it could help, and they found My AskAI.

An Immediate Impact on Support

For the past 12 months, Zinc had been anticipating moving to an AI-based support solution and had been preparing and documenting all of their processes as they knew that this would form the foundation of the AI’s responses.

They signed up for My AskAI in early January and were able to instantly get started:

“The speed of implementation was unreal, we got it live in minutes and the impact was immediate. We forecasted a slow impact, over time, but it was literally overnight” - Sam

As a result, Conrad’s team has been able to spend more time with candidates on complex queries, ensuring that they keep their moniker of providing “the fastest background checks in the west”!

For Zinc, one of the real differentiators of My AskAI was the human handover feature, which allowed them to jump in and help when the AI couldn’t answer and ensure that their candidates and clients get the best blend of world-class human and AI support.

This has all started to make a real impact on Zinc’s operational metrics too:

“Since implementing My AskAI, the AI has answered at least 68% of all queries we get, and we have managed to get our response time down to under 60 seconds, a goal we have had for the last 6 months and finally achieved now with My AskAI” - Sam

Conrad, always looking for ways to improve Zinc’s Customer Experience, has been making the most of the Custom Answers and Insights features to improve their AI’s responses and get a feel for the common questions they are getting so his team can continue to improve their documentation.

“I like how clearly the insights get labelled, it makes it easy to summarize and share the issues coming up with our team” - Conrad

What next?

While Zinc looks set to continue their rapid growth, Conrad will continue to meet the challenge laid before him by Sam of not hiring more people and is now keen to see how new features like the AI Email Assistant can further help his team continue to exceed their candidate and client’s expectations.

Learn more about building an AI-first support operation in our complete guide.