How 1Password Saved 16,000 Service Agent Hours in Only 6 Months with Drift

The Challenge

This customer-centric mindset brought Drift and 1Password together in 2022 to help drive marketing and sales meetings — but the team knew they could leverage Drift to do more. They knew they could use our unified platform to uplevel their customer support experience while also making their service agents’ lives that much easier.

“One of the key drivers for customer support was to lower our first response times and our resolution times,” explained Ashley Sellers, Support Manager at 1Password. “We try to focus on lowering the times that a customer has to wait compared to our email support.”

And while the team had used chat in the past, they never had deflection or logic built in. The experience wasn’t great for website visitors or the 1Password team, so this time around, they wanted to create an exceptional customer and user experience.

“Having a unified tool for sales, marketing, and service was definitely important for us,” said Katelyn Price, Manager, Lifecycle and Customer Marketing. “It’s the same website. People are going from page to page, so separating that out into two different tools was really not something we even considered. It was an easy step to work within the same platform.”

The Solution

With Ashley’s team of ten agents up and running in Drift, the customer support process transformed. They saw increased efficiency, quicker resolutions, and an all-around better customer experience — all while operating marketing, sales, and service on the same platform.

Drift AI: INCREASED SUPPORT AGENT EFFICIENCY AND CUSTOM TOPICS

While Drift enables customers to jump into a conversation with a 1Password service agent in real-time, it also ensures that conversations that don’t need to reach a service agent, well, don’t. With AI bots, customers can hold a two-way conversation — but one that doesn’t require any human availability.

Drift’s Conversational AI gives customers immediate answers to commonly asked questions, 24/7, while live service agents can dedicate time to helping other customers.

Katelyn explained, “We are using AI to power most conversations across sales, marketing, and service. We are really focused on answering common questions automatically, getting those easy questions answered, and only looping in a human if that person still needs help.”

Less time answering simple questions means more time spent on higher-value activities.

Drift’s Conversational AI bots come pre-trained with topics, but every business has unique customer inquiries they need to account for.

By combining topics captured in Drift AI’s open-text conversations with insights from customer email inquiries, the team can build out custom AI topics to account for every customer inquiry, and help the service team proactively head off support requests. As Katelyn shared, “We’ve learned a lot about the different variations of how one question might be asked and what’s of interest to people at a certain point in time.”

faster time to resolution

Drift also provided an answer for those conversations where customers needed to be routed directly to a rep. Before Drift, customers had to navigate through 1Password’s website until they found the right support questions, then resolve the issue back and forth (asynchronously) through email.

“Now you just go to one of our pages that has the live chatbot and go through the options there. If the team is online, you automatically get routed straight to an online agent to get help. If the team isn’t online, then it automatically creates an email and sends it to our email support,” Ashley explained.

A SUPERIOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

What do increased team efficiency, tailored customer support topics, and faster resolutions all have in common? They come together to create an exceptional experience for customers seeking help on 1Password’s website.

And with Drift, support is no longer isolated to just 1Password’s support pages.

“Drift has surfaced plenty of insights for us that we are using to support our customers better,” Katelyn shared. “It’s really shown us where people want help. We have customers asking product questions or billing questions on our business top-of-funnel page or our pricing page. It’s not always where you’d expect them to be,” she said.

And when the support team isn’t online to help during off-hours, there’s always email fallback to ensure no user falls through the cracks or inquiry goes unsolved.

And with these kinds of results after only a few months, the team is excited to expand upon their success by increasing the footprint of Drift across their site.

“Our next step for Drift is really to increase visibility. We know that our customers and our prospects — whether they want to talk to sales or customer support — want help in various places, and we want to make that more visible and more accessible where people need it,” Katelyn said.