Wine Enthusiast is the online destination for creating a wine lifestyle, selling everything someone might need to go along with it: corkscrews, wine glasses, wine cellars and fridges, furniture, and magazines. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, people started staying home and drinking more wine—as a result, Wine Enthusiast’s customer base grew significantly—and so did their need to provide exceptional customer experiences for the 100,000 inquiries they receive from customers every year. 

John Burke is the retailer’s Vice President of Customer Experience & Technology, where he ensures every wine enthusiast gets the best support possible. When Burke joined Wine Enthusiast, his role was to figure out how the company would responsibly grow its customer experience (CX) organization to meet the growing demands and expectations of customers—without needing to make 60 additional hires. 

A need to answer broader business questions

While many think of customer service as point-of-sales service, Wine Enthusiast supports a much longer customer journey from purchase to product warranties, parts, and maintenance. At first, Burke started by rolling out tools and platforms to better communicate with customers. Over time, he discovered his organization needed to know what customers were contacting them about, the quality agents were delivering, and the consistency they were doing it with. 

But his CX team was spending an inordinate amount of time grading conversations and could only gather a few meaningful insights. They were also only reviewing conversations that led to complaints—missing hundreds of positive customer interactions and valuable feedback. And with Wine Enthusiast customer support phone conversations sometimes lasting 20 to 40 minutes, the work of analyzing the calls could take hours.

“We were always looking at the worst of the worst conversations and using them to evaluate our team when they’re having hundreds of perfectly pleasant conversations."

The bigger challenge for Burke, who sits in on marketing and other cross-functional meetings, was answering broader business questions about what products customers love, what they don’t like, and issues they were seeing.

The solution: Infusing AI into the Voice of the Customer

Burke’s already busy team spent half their time evaluating calls, trying to determine who their top performers are, who needs additional coaching and training, and who adheres to CX processes.

But while Burke realized that the advent of AI could transform his organization, he didn’t have the luxury of creating a full team to deploy AI to understand customer conversations better. He needed a solution that would give him insight into what customers were talking about, inform business decisions, drive growth, and help the team fix issues upfront—and empower the team to perform better and free up managers’ time to actually coach agents. He went looking for a best-in-class solution and found Echo AI to analyze phone calls, provide insights, and empower the entire team.

A simple configuration process

Wine Enthusiast started the rollout of Echo AI, taking a month to experiment and dial in on what conversation excellence  should look like. Using their cloud-based telephony system, which records conversations securely, calls would connect through Echo AI’s API to be analyzed.

“We didn’t have to change the way we were operating. We could still use our same phone system and our ticketing system and allow EchoAI secure access to only the data they needed to accomplish the assessment.”

Wine Enthusiast’s business isn’t as simple as just selling a wine lifestyle,, but getting Echo AI trained on their business model was. “You’re going to hear about corkscrews,” Burke explains. “You’re going to hear about furniture. You’re going to hear about magazine articles. You’re going to hear about refunds.” 

All Burke had to do was give Echo AI some context on Wine Enthusiast’s business and a few examples of human analysis and the system was ready to go. Now, when calls come in, Echo AI transcribes them, redacts personally identifiable information, and generates summaries, tags, sentiment, intent, and resolution. It also conducts a macro analysis on whether the conversation relates to Wine Enthusiast’s key strategic issues of product feedback, marketing promotions, and agent performance.

Immediate ROI

Before Echo AI, Burke only analyzed rep performance, but now, he can identify the performance of products, too. For example, when Echo AI surfaced several complaints that were traced back to a manufacturing defect, they were able to address the issue and pull products off shelves that would have cost them down the road.

“We really lucked out because we’re not usually able to see something like that this clearly and identify we have a manufacturing issue with this specific set of products [...] And we addressed it,” Burke says. “We also made it right with those customers. That was one of those moments when thought, ‘I don’t know how we ever would have found that insight out.’”

The benefits of Echo AI

1. An understanding of what matters to customers previously lost in the volume of calls. With EchoAI, Wine Enthusiast’s LLM now synthesizes all customer calls and surfaces consumer trends, so Burke can better identify what matters to them and ensure they have a great experience. 

   
   

2. Identifying opportunities for growth and differentiation. EchoAI has helped Burke identify training that could help reps develop the tools necessary to de-escalate, avoid conflict, pivot, or pass the conversation along to someone else, finding new areas to double down on hospitality training and further improve the customer experience.

   
   

3. Saving time and empowering managers. “We’ve effectively eliminated manual grading,” Burke says. “We don’t do it anymore. We just let the system do it.” As a result, managers and supervisors now have time to coach their teams instead of just reviewing calls. 

   
   

4. More consistency, less bias in grading. Because different managers have different management styles, expectations, and biases, grading could often vary. “When we switched to AI, that bias was removed,” Burke says. “What we were seeing was the actual analysis of the conversation without the human nature of thinking, ‘Well, the agent has had a tough week.’ Or ‘the customer was really laying into them, and I think they really did well enough.’ We removed that element from the equation.”

   
   

5. Expanding room for experimentation. While using Echo AI has been a powerful assessment tool for Wine Enthusiast, it’s also helped them be more nimble. For example, they ran a promotion with a sale and decided to test how customers would respond to a shipping-related discount. They put in a prompt for EchoAI to look at conversations in a set time period about shipping discounts and analyze customer sentiments.

“We were very [quickly] able to pull out an analysis of it,” Burke explains. “Alternatively, I can’t think of another good way of doing that, short of saying to the team, ‘Listen to every call and have every rep make a tally every time a customer mentions that.'” With EchoAI, they were able to run an experiment and analyze the results quickly. 

Becoming a more proactive customer experience organization 

Burke’s team has largely focused on retrospective analysis of the customer support team, including how reps are improving and how customers are reacting to products. In the future, he hopes to shift his approach to be more proactive. 

“I think if we can move to a place where we’re prompting the model not just to look back on what it’s done but to say, ‘You know our business well enough now. Tell us if something seems odd to you’—that will be an even bigger win.”