Grundfos Partners with Go Autonomous for AI-Assisted Case Creation and Management

Grundfos has embarked on a program to fuel innovation and improve customer proximity. The transformation is responding to trends in changing customer needs by investing significantly in innovation and digital capabilities focusing on simplicity and speed. On this journey, they have restructured their sales, marketing, technology, and operations functions to serve four different customer segments. 
To enable the transformation digitally, they have employed AI-powered case creation by Go Autonomous. The implementation will save customer care time spent on manual data entry, improve employee satisfaction, and provide deep insights into the company’s customer care operations. 

AI-assisted case creation and management – why and how?
Customer care departments have always been overloaded with customer requests. It is not unusual for an international industrial equipment manufacturer or distributor (even with a high-performing e-commerce platform covering 50% of order intake) to receive millions of emails a year in the shared inboxes of the customer support team. This poses a challenge of organizing the work but also an opportunity of harnessing commercial and operational insights at scale. Contrary to the established manual approaches to the points above, Go Autonomous helps with both of them simultaneously with artificial intelligence. Here is how.

Companies have largely embraced case management systems (either integrated in their CRM or as dedicated solutions) to register customer requests and thus structure the operations and collect valuable statistics. Even though the approach largely works, it comes with the huge cost of manual data entry and increased response times. With a traditional case management system, a customer support agent needs not only to respond to a customer request but also manually create the case, classify the request type, and assign the right colleague to handle it. In large organizations, that can easily take 1-3 minutes per request and this process is prone to errors.

”Automating customer requests comes with at least two substantial benefits. Being able to answer customers faster drives lead times down and sales up. When it at the same time reduces the workload for internal sales and drives internal efficiency, we have a strong cocktail.”

– Jesper Olesen, Group Vice President, Digital & Customer Excellence at Grundfos

Upon realizing the limitations of the existing solution, the customer partnered with Go Autonomous to enable AI-assisted ticket management within their case management system. With AI-powered Case Management by Go Autonomous, every customer request is classified into the 70+ most frequent B2B intents, e.g., ‘order creation’, ‘order adjustment’, ‘request for order status’, and many more, covering topics of quoting, delivery, product information requests, accounting, servicing, and complaints. Combined with deep recognition of products and accounts, automating ticket creation and management becomes a matter of configuration. 

Impact in numbers
In the first year of deploying Go Autonomous some of the best-performing divisions reached up to 70% automation rate. Similar traction is observed with all quote-related requests. 
With further planned process optimization, master data clean-up and enrichment, and further AI training this number can come close to 90% or more. Reaching such levels of automation is, of course, a journey. However, the positive news is that with the direct impact on automation rate from using artificial intelligence, embarking on such optimization projects has a clear calculable ROI, in part because it exposes areas of improvement and frees up time and resources to work on these areas of opportunity. 

”AI-driven automation serves as a powerful motivator for process optimization. With immediate and tangible results that are transparent to all stakeholders, the impact of master data cleanup and enrichment is unmistakable. Additionally, AI provides a compelling case for cross-regional process standardization, making the roadmap for further optimization evident and clear.”

– Olga Chernyakova Poulsen, Senior Business Process Owner at Grundfos

Inspired by the success of order and quote ticket management that already released hundreds of hours of manual work from customer care teams, Grundfos expects an additional business impact of similar magnitude in 2023 from the automation of ticket management for a wider scope of cases, including product-related information requests, complaints, etc. In addition, Grundfos is actively integrating AI-powered sales order automation by Go Autonomous, which can eliminate the need for ticket creation in some instances altogether. 

Conclusion
It’s more important than ever to optimize business processes and prioritize exceptional customer service as these are levers to growing the bottom line in times of business uncertainty. Those are some of the reasons why Grundfos turned to artificial intelligence to help repurpose time spent on manual data entry into more value-adding activities. AI-powered case management has enabled the organization to realize the benefits of its SAP solution without the need for manual data entry. The result? A more customer-centric operation focused on meeting customers’ unique needs.