How Verb automates 49% of its customer service tickets with Siena

Learn how Siena became the newest member of Verb’s customer service team, helping the brand energize its customer experience and automate 49% of tickets.

1. ^49% automation rate
2. ^30s first response time
3. ^26m resolution time

Verb grew online for many years with a phenomenal customer experience front and center. As we’ve scaled, we now partner with Siena AI to continue to power and improve that excellent CX that’s key to our brand. - Bennett Byerley, Co-Founder & COO at Verb

About Verb

Verb was founded by three college friends who wanted to make a next-generation energy product that can go anywhere. Verb’s caffeinated energy bars have as much caffeine as a shot of espresso — without the jitters. Today, the brand offers more than a dozen flavors of energy bars online and in stores throughout the U.S.

Challenge

Verb is known for a personalized CX, but this was hard to scale manually

When Verb launched, its founders knew they had a unique product: a go-anywhere snack that contains 80mg of caffeine from organic green tea. Soon enough, the brand became known not just for its one-of-a-kind product — but also its phenomenal customer experience.

That top-notch CX is something Bennett Byerley, co-Founder & COO at Verb, wanted to maintain as they scaled: “We wanted a human touch with all of our customers across every contact point.” At the same time, offering a personalized experience at scale requires more and more resources.

Verb operates with a lean team, so they set out to find an efficient CX solution that met two criteria:

• Powered by AI: This solution had to streamline or even automate customer comms, freeing up the Verb team to focus on strategic, higher-impact priorities.
• Match Verb’s tone & branding: Verb wanted the AI to sound like an upbeat, supportive friend without coming across as cheesy or overly optimistic.

When the Verb team eventually discovered Siena, they sat for a demo and were blown away by her ability to mimic human speech.

Energy is really personal to people, so we wanted to replicate that with a very personal, friendly brand. Our internal CX team nails this, but as we grow, it’s a bit challenging to scale that personal touch. Once we discovered Siena, she allowed us to elevate our brand voice and do so at scale. - Bennett Byerley, Co-Founder & COO at Verb

Solution

Verb’s customers can text Siena — just like they’d text a friend

After easily setting up prompts and automated responses for Siena, Verb began honing her persona. And by the time Verb wrapped up internal tests of Siena’s capabilities, she could reply to customers’ texts like any other member of their CX team. In fact, Verb’s FAQ page puts Siena front and center: “Text us like a friend!”

As a result, Siena empowers Verb to:

• Scale chat capabilities alongside Verb’s growing consumer base
• Maintain the personal touch that was so crucial to the brand’s early growth

Bennett attributes this success to three main factors:

• Siena emulates your brand voice in a way that resonates with customers.
• Siena’s efficacy and accuracy mean you’re not constantly updating prompts or debugging.
• Siena’s intuitive interface gives Verb an easy way to evaluate her performance and give her real-time feedback.

Plus she is able to relate to customers and understand their needs. Bennett says Siena is a “true partner and supporting friend.” The Verb team has continued to tweak Siena’s persona over time, and now she feels like another member of the team — one who has taken some strain off their lean customer support team as the brand scales.

Siena truly lives up to what the team said she’s capable of. Plus, the user interface and rollout experience were outstanding all around. Siena is easy to understand and work with, and we were able to implement her smoothly from day one. - Bennett Byerley, Co-Founder & COO at Verb

Results

Empowered by Siena, the Verb team automates 49% of tickets

Since implementing Siena, Bennett reports that Siena handles the majority of day-to-day repetitive CX tasks. Her human counterparts only need to step in when a user needs a little extra TLC.

At a glance, Siena enables the Verb team to:

• Automate accurate responses to common customer questions
• Elevate their brand voice through a tailored, human-like persona
• Easily update Siena to answer even more questions as they scale

Most importantly, Verb can keep its team lean as they scale the business. The results of our partnership so far include:

1. ^49% automation rate
2. ^30s first response time
3. ^26m resolution time

Looking forward, Bennett is excited to keep working with Siena AI because, in his words, we’re a cutting-edge tech partner that listens to feedback and continuously improves our product. With this, he believes Siena is set to deliver the best CX in the market for years to come.

Siena enables brands to take advantage of expanding chat capabilities and provide a scalable customer experience. You can also monitor her at a high level and detect any trends. Siena meshes really nicely with a human touch — like a true extension of your team. - Bennett Byerley, Co-Founder & COO at Verb