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About Conductor
Conductor is the leading organic marketing platform built for enterprise SEO, content, and web teams. Using advanced SEO insights, Conductor helps organizations increase organic search visibility and website traffic. The company also centralizes website optimization, making it easier than ever before to tie action to impact.
Joe Taylor is the VP of Customer Success at Conductor. He spends his time developing customer success strategies, leading and mentoring his team, and defining key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success. Joe is responsible for the company-wide implementation of AI, a top priority for the company.
Challenges at Conductor:
Outcomes:
Joe Taylor was midway through evaluating knowledge management tools when Ask-AI came calling. As Conductor’s Vice President of Customer Success, and previously its VP, Talent Development & Culture, Joe is intimately attuned to any bottlenecks and challenges on his team. And fostering better team collaboration and improving Support outcomes was high on his list to tackle.
Like many organizations, information at Conductor is spread out through a variety of sources and channels. Some things would be in a Google Doc, others in Confluence, still more in places such as Slack threads, Guru, emails, and more. Without a single source of truth to manage everything from onboarding processes and best practices to frequently asked questions, Conductor employees struggled to find the information they needed when they needed it.
Furthermore, Conductor had recently acquired ContentKing and SearchMetrics – and bringing together the organizations meant dealing with three separate customer ticketing systems, help centers, support documentation, knowledge bases, and more. “We were struggling with integrating our systems,” says Joe. “It was difficult for the new teams to get up to speed and feel like they were really part of Conductor.”
In came Ask-AI. Offering a universal AI assistant that integrated all of Conductor’s various data sources, it promised to be a powerful tool for employees to find the most up-to-date, accurate information, and foster collaboration. Joe kicked off a pilot in August 2023, in direct competition with several AI vendors he was already piloting.
The process began with a pilot team of 30 users chosen across Support, Customer Success, and Sales to use the AI assistant – with a focus on Support.
With nine different software tools and multiple ticketing systems, Conductor’s tech stack was always going to be complex to bring together. Other AI vendors quoted a 2-3 month integration process before Conductor could start using their tools. To Joe’s surprise, Ask-AI had the entirety of Conductor’s org-wide data ready to use in just three weeks.
“Within weeks, our employees were able to access the information they needed from a centralized location in Ask-AI," says Joe. "I’ve been shocked at how easy it is."
In less than two months, the team’s productivity transformed. Leveraging their new AI assistant, employees could find answers to customer questions in seconds, quickly share information between colleagues, and cut down on time spent documenting new info or looking for more answers.
The early results also highlighted how challenging it was for employees to find information previously. It quickly became evident that the best answer to any question could come from anywhere in Conductor – their Zendesk, Confluence, Slack, Intercom, JIRA, Guru, and more. Now, instead of having to search through every software tool, employees can use their new AI assistant to surface the best answer across everywhere – instantly.
Distribution of the Sources of the Highest Ranking Answer per Question
"Before Ask-AI, we struggled with feedback scores on collaboration – a reflection of how hard it was for reps to find information and get up to speed," says Joe. "We recently re-ran our surveys and saw a significant 17-point increase within a six-month time period. Ask-AI really transformed cross-team collaboration in our company for the better.”
For Joe, the choice was clear. That December, Conductor officially selected Ask-AI to serve as their workplace AI assistant. Ask-AI’s speed of integration, accuracy of results, and transformation of Conductor’s productivity made them the clear choice against the other AI vendors they piloted.
“The hardest thing for any organization is behavior change,” says Joe. “Rather than forcing behavior change, we’re bringing in a solution that meets people where they are and simplifies operations. That’s why we selected Ask-AI.”
And the transformations for Conductor didn’t stop there.
Since equipping its workforce with the AI assistant, Conductor’s Support agents have decreased their First Response Time performance on new Support tickets by 21% – a 15-minute improvement that has been reflected in stronger case resolutions and CSATs.
Improvements for the Support team extended beyond First Response Time. Support agents using the AI assistant also reduced Time To Resolution on tickets by an astounding 38% – from a company average of 92 minutes to 56 minutes, a dramatic reduction of 35 minutes spent per case. And that’s not all – the more that agents used Ask-AI, the better their numbers were. The top Ask-AI users at Conductor averaged a whopping 191% faster resolution times compared to the rest of the team.
Support agents now ramp to productive levels faster than ever. While exact figures are confidential, ramp times for new agents have been slashed by several weeks since the introduction of the AI assistant – even by a few months in some cases.
Ask-AI is now one of the first systems Conductor teaches new agents to use. “We use a lot of acronyms and internal jargon here. It can be hard for new hires to follow conversations and know what people are talking about. Ask-AI solves this problem for us now. If someone is confused about a certain term, they use Ask-AI to get the answer quickly,” says Joe.
What’s more, the AI assistant is automatically reporting on trends around questions being asked, helping the company identify knowledge gaps that require training and determine what new documentation is needed.
Conductor also reports significant improvements in ticket capacity and output ever since Support agents were equipped with the new AI assistant. “The weekly # of tickets handled per agent is up 77% this year,” says Joe.
Furthermore, as natural team turnover occurred, Conductor found that entry-level Tier 1 agents armed with the AI assistant could output activity and quality equal to that of previous, more senior Tier 2 agents. “It’s not just that Tier 1 agents handle more tickets than before – they also supply higher fidelity answers, more information and context, all via the information that the AI assistant surfaces for them.”
This breakthrough has enabled senior Tier 2 and 3 agents to focus on more complicated, hands-on cases – creating a new, more cost-efficient mix of Support agents to meet the board mandate for company efficiency and finding cost savings at Conductor.
“Headcount cost savings alone have more than paid for Ask-AI,” says Joe. “Our agents are more efficient, ramp quicker, and provide higher-quality answers to customers.”
The deployment of Ask-AI was notable as it came during a period of cost-cutting and drive to efficiency at Conductor – and across the SaaS industry. Under direction from the Board to reduce software expenditures and prepare for a new era of sustainable growth, Conductor scrutinized its tech stack and found many areas of redundancy and elimination – but Ask-AI was deemed critical to continue at full speed.
“During a time when we were prioritizing efficiency and cutting software costs, Ask-AI was one of the only new software tools we purchased.”
Ask-AI’s assistant plays a critical role in Conductor’s future operating efficiency and its focus on unlocking employee productivity – and will be Conductor’s core software tool to consolidate system data and disparate information.
So was the juice worth the squeeze? For Conductor, the answer is a resounding yes. There was positive return on investment from Ask-AI from day one. Conductor is now focused on rolling out Ask-AI’s workplace AI assistant company-wide, across all teams and departments. “The pilot went super well. It was super easy to integrate everything – and there was a clear business case on our core KPIs around Support. It was enough for us to move forward and bring it company-wide.”
“The pilot went super well. It was super easy to integrate everything – and there was a clear business case on our core KPIs around the Support Team. It was enough for us to move forward and bring it company-wide.”
Ask-AI is the workplace AI assistant for your entire organization – bringing AI-powered workflows, Enterprise Search, and Knowledge Management, all in one place. Turbocharge your workforce by connecting it to the entirety of your organization’s systems and knowledge, and unlock employee productivity with dozens of AI-powered workflows at their fingertips.
