From AI Frustration to Faster Support: How Smartness Cut First Response Time from Hours to 22 Minutes with Pluno

Joseph D'Apuzzo

We are Smartness. We are one of the fastest growing businesses in the lodging industry right now, and we've got a bunch of different products under our umbrella. So we do PMS, we do channel managers, we have an RMS system our customers use to manage their pricing strategy, and our support teams are very small and efficient across all our products.

So each product has their own team dedicated to it, and that's how we work. So we have small, efficient teams handling tickets for products. Right now each team handles between one and a half thousand and 2,000 tickets per month.

Syed Ali

Okay.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

So yeah, it's like that. I would say around... well, now that we have Pluno, the numbers aren't that high anymore. So I would say more between the thousand and one and a half thousand, but yeah, this is pretty much what we handle. Every quarter it's around 6,000 or 7,000 requests coming from customers.

Syed Ali

And quickly, because you mentioned Pluno, are there any specific type of inquiries that it is helping you manage right now?

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Right now mainly it's how-to requests and errors that we have documentation for. So my main goal is to reduce the amount of pressure that how-to questions put on our support. Most of our requests, apart from errors, come from "How do I do this? How can I do that?" And these are all questions we have knowledge base for and that we have ticket history for. So Pluno comes in and can tackle all this.

But it's not just that, because there's also a sort of QA component that really makes our teams efficient. As I mentioned, our teams are very small, so they need to go fast. Our company's growing fast, therefore everything has to be quick, quick, quick, super quick. And what Pluno lets us do, apart from answering how-to tickets, is all that back and forth with the customer: we're missing this information, we're missing that.

Honestly, when I jump on a ticket right now, I don't even look at what the customer said, because I have the summary from Pluno, and Pluno tells me, "Cool, you have to enable that." I go there, I enable it. We're done. Thank you very much. Ticket is resolved. So it's not just a success that I measure through resolved tickets, but also through this time we're saving.

Syed Ali

Pluno wasn't the tool that you started with, right?

Joseph D'Apuzzo

No, absolutely not. When I say that I tried them all, I tried them all. I started from those little... I don't know if I can mention them or I shouldn't. But I started with small software that had really good stats, apparently, from the websites, but they lacked complexity.

Our businesses are a bit outside of Zendesk intents. We're not an e-commerce. We have different flows. So we needed something a bit more complex, which these businesses couldn't accomplish.

The solution I tried the most is actually a solution from one of the competitors of the ticketing system we use. Obviously it came with a lot of downsides, but honestly I was too naive to not see them. Initially I wasn't seeing tickets coming through, because this solution was answering them, but digging through it you could actually see frustration build up in our customer base.

It was just providing walls of text, and I would say also not so conversational. It was a bit more, "I'm a chatbot, this is a wall of text. If you want to talk to someone, answer this exactly and you'll be passed to someone." So it really wasn't a great experience, and I was happy with the results because our stats really jumped. But that's not how you solve things, or really solve them.

Syed Ali

And this wasn't a small one, right?

Joseph D'Apuzzo

You mean the solution?

Syed Ali

Yeah.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Yeah. It's one of the biggest in the market, I guess, and it surely works well with, I repeat, businesses like e-commerce businesses, or things that don't require complexity. But if you require a bit more complexity, you need something different.

Syed Ali

And you said it was somehow positively affecting the numbers, but at the same time...

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Yeah, obviously we had lots of resolved tickets, but the quality of those resolved tickets, when you started digging into it, wasn't great, and our customers obviously started complaining after a few months.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

And that's when Pluno came into play. But actually, I didn't look for you. You challenged me. You came to my door and you said, "Hey, we're better than this. Let us prove it to you." And I was a bit skeptical, but the results were miles ahead from the beginning.

The other solution has lots of cons. Obviously, being competitors with the solution we use, communication was only one way. So there was a lot of maintenance involved in the AI agent solution. We had to provide all the knowledge of the knowledge base, maintain it, do QA on it on a different platform. Reporting was all over the shop. It wasn't great on that aspect.

Pluno resolves all that, because obviously being integrated with Zendesk directly, it has a completely different pool to answer questions, and then maintenance is also very easy. All the tools they have are connected to Zendesk, so I can use them to make my life easier. Maintenance is super light, apart obviously from responses here and there that you may need to fix, but that's normal.

It's day and night. Also the quality of the responses: the other solution was just a wall of text, very robotic and also formatted improperly, and Pluno's responses are conversational. So we called our AI agent with an Italian name, because it just has conversations day and night with our customers.

Initially our customers thought, "Oh, this guy is human." They were sending him kisses and saying, "Oh, but you never sleep," or things like that, that make you realize how good the solution is. But not only that, our colleagues also keep tagging him in tickets, like, "Marco, why you don't answer here? Why you didn't say that?" I had to say to my team, "Guys, he's not real. He's here, but he's not a human person." But that's how good he is at talking to people.

Syed Ali

That's really good to hear. Yeah.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

So it's good.

Syed Ali

And how is it affecting your metrics right now? If you were to quantify it.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Obviously the resolved tickets numbers went down compared to the previous solution, but I know that these resolved tickets are real resolved tickets. So right now I know that if it's taking over 40% of our tickets, that's a real number.

Another problem I had is that the other solution wasn't escalating things. It wasn't assigning things to a specific group I needed to go to. So obviously I needed to have someone check a view constantly to catch open tickets, or catch tickets that were not really resolved, and pull them to the other view I needed.

Pluno knows when something needs to be escalated. Pluno knows when something is urgent that needs to be looked at, and it does it. And I know that if something hasn't come to me, it's not urgent and doesn't need to get fixed by a human person, and this is fantastic.

Syed Ali

So it's more reliable in terms of what you...

Joseph D'Apuzzo

It's very reliable. Yeah, 100%.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Obviously you still get customers that send an email, it responds, and then the customer doesn't respond again and comes to me, and he's like, "Oh, but it gave me an incorrect answer," right? But then you need to also educate your customers. Cool, he made a mistake. Just tell it that he made a mistake, or that he hasn't helped you, as you would do with a real person, right?

Because if I tell something to my customers which is wrong, they would tell me, "Hey, this is wrong." So why wouldn't you do it with an AI solution? So it's a bit of a mindset that needs to be challenged here and there, and obviously things that we need to improve as well in our workflows, because if it doesn't have an answer for that, it means that we need to improve our knowledge base.

Syed Ali

So going back, how was the switch for you, the transition from this past solution to Pluno? Did you have to go through an overhaul or something?

Joseph D'Apuzzo

The transition has been pretty smooth. It was pretty much just plug and play. The other solution already set up everything, so for Pluno we just recycled what we had, and it was just a smooth transition.

Obviously we required a feature you didn't have to switch all the products over: that knowledge base differentiation. So I could only switch some of the products initially, but you shipped it in a very short time. So I have nothing to say about it. It was just super smooth. Yeah.

Syed Ali

Okay. And how is the communication with the Pluno team when you need any changes?

Joseph D'Apuzzo

This is one of the best points, actually, because we chat every day, basically. So I couldn't ask for a better partner, I would say. You're always there. You work day and night, you also talk to me on weekends. Therefore, you guys are great: very responsive and very open to feedback, suggestions, anything I may have. So you guys are doing a great job.

Syed Ali

Okay, that's really good to know. And is Pluno making specific changes for you based on your requests, or...

Joseph D'Apuzzo

It does. Yeah. As I mentioned, that knowledge base bit was huge for us. Being able to split brands into different knowledge silos and just pull from those, that was a big feature. That was a big piece that I wasn't expecting you guys would have delivered so fast.

And other features I have requested, I've seen them in app after a very brief time. Obviously not everything is important. I would say there are some features that are just nice to have that can wait, but you are very receptive to interesting, let's say crucial, additions to your platform, and know what has value, and you do ship it fast. So I'm happy with that.

Syed Ali

And how are you anticipating it now, moving forward with Pluno? What type of changes in the metrics and overall customer experience do you see?

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Yeah. This is mostly on us. I'm actually thinking about a complete overhaul of how we work with Pluno. Right now, I want to achieve, in a perfect world, Pluno handling 100% of at least the how-to questions, or light errors like that.

But for that, I know that I need to change how our knowledge base is structured, how workflows are structured, and there's a lot of work that I would need to do to do this overhaul. But I know that Pluno adapts pretty well to everything I do. So yeah, let's see what we can do with it.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

One number that actually went down, and that was pretty important for us, was the first reply time. Thanks to Pluno, which provides us with such high quality summaries of tickets, we can just jump in a ticket in a few minutes and we can respond to it. So right now we have a first response time of 22 minutes. Before Pluno, it was in the hours, I would say.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

So it went down by a lot, and the team was super happy about it. Our customers are also happy about it. So yeah, it's been a very positive experience. There's no reason why someone wouldn't want to try.

Syed Ali

That's great to hear. Have any of your customers made any comments about their experience so far?

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Yeah, exactly. Some customers, obviously, when it comes to it, it's always a challenge about challenging the customer's mindset. And the paradox is that we have an AI component as well. It's mainly aimed at the lodging industry, and we have customers that use our chatbot to answer their own customers but don't want to use AI. So they want to use our AI to answer their questions, you know. That's a bit the paradox.

But honestly, there's this mindset that always needs to be challenged. This is a big change our world is going through, but it needs to be done well. We see lots of businesses out there that now have chatbots. If you go to Just Eat, if you go to Deliveroo, if you talk to any big company out there, they all have a chatbot because they want to, and that's our goal.

We don't want to replace people. We don't want to expand our team further. But obviously you need to do it well. You can't just have a bot that would prevent customers from getting the answer they need. And that's why Pluno is great, because it can do that.

Syed Ali

So from a scalability point of view, do you think it will allow you to stay where you are and handle more of the operations, or do you...

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Yes, that's exactly what we want to do. But to do that, obviously I need to instruct him more. I need to give him a bit more guidance, because it lets you do that. You give it a workflow, it follows it. So we need to be good at that. And then if you do it well, it follows what you did.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

It's a very, very solid solution that, as I said, not only doesn't prevent customers from getting the answer they need, but it's actually the opposite. It tries to work with the customer to get there. As I said, this is my opinion. This is my humble opinion.

Support starts with real talent. So if you think about using AI to replace talent, you're doing it wrong. You need to have AI to make your team's work much more efficient. And that's what Pluno does, because while it's solving things, it's also making the rest of the team's life easier. And that's, I think, where the treasure is in this solution.

It's, I would say, obviously scalable. It's obviously adaptable to your needs. It has the complexity a business outside of general intents needs. So there's no reason not to give it a try. Just give it your 50 questions, and they'll come up with a matrix, and then you can analyze it and decide.

I feel that, unfortunately, the fault here is of the solutions that don't work. Obviously you see 10 solutions that don't work.

Syed Ali

Yeah.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

And then if you have 10 more coming through the door, you're going to think... your mindset is already going to be set on, "Oh, this is just another chatbot that doesn't work." So that's a difficult thing to challenge. And yeah, that's a real challenge. But for us, obviously, you insisted on letting us try your product, and I'm glad you did, because otherwise we would probably have had a very angry customer base right now.

Syed Ali

What actually convinced you to go ahead with the simulation?

Joseph D'Apuzzo

Well, I jumped on a call with Korbi, and he said, "Let me do it." He just pushed me and said, "Let me do this thing," because, obviously being a bit skeptical, I told him, "Oh yeah, I'll give you these 50 questions, because you're never going to be better than our current solution." And he shipped it. And when he shipped it, I saw the results and was like, "No, we need to do this, because this is miles ahead of the competition." And that's how it happened.

Syed Ali

That's really good to know.

Joseph D'Apuzzo

So, thanks Korbi, and thanks everyone.