Slovenian company EK Water Blocks is a leading manufacturer of water cooling, extreme cooling, and air-cooling products for computer processors and memory devices—serving customers in more than 30 countries. However, its continued growth quickly made answering to its customer queries a challenge, and EK saw the need to optimize and automate its customer support process. With the help of Microsoft partner CREApro, EK adopted an AI solution using Azure Machine Learning. This has resulted in faster customer service and an increase of customer satisfaction by 10 points.
Slovenian company EK has grown from a small premium liquid cooling product manufacturer to a renowned supplier in the industry. Its customer base now covers individuals and enterprises in 30 countries. While its small team amplifies its success, EK needed the help of technology to support its continued growth. According to Matjaž Krč, CEO at EK, “We want to offer more value to our customers and, at the same time, help our employees be more efficient.”
The right customer query in the right place
“Customers often have questions regarding our products, so we needed to quickly analyze each query’s nature and urgency to assign them to the most suitable agent, while considering the team’s workload. We also have a customer support team based in the United States, but the classification of those requests was also done manually by the team based in Slovenia, delaying our response to customers there because of the time difference,” explains Robert Osojnik, IT Manager at EK. “So, we decided to automate the process using AI and machine learning.”
EK worked with local Microsoft partner CREApro to build its solution on Azure Machine Learning. “With Azure, we could build the infrastructure fast without extra cost or investment on hardware licenses. That also means a fast implementation,” Osojnik adds.
Quality service in less time
“In three months, we’ve shortened our customer support response time by 30 percent, with the request ticket directly being classified and assigned to the right agent 9 times out of 10. And more importantly, customer satisfaction has increased by 10 points,” Osojnik points out.
This solution not only completely removed the time difference issue for the support team based in the United States―who get assigned a request ticket no matter when it was sent by the customer―it also made the Slovenian team’s lives easier. “Before the optimization, one employee had to start working at 6:00 AM to do all the manual ticket classifications. Now, everybody can be in at 8:00 AM,” says Osojnik. “This has made employees very happy, as they can be much more focused on their work with less stress,” he adds.
“I see the enormous potential of AI, so we want our other departments to use it as well,” Krč concludes. “For example, we’re currently looking into using AI to optimize inventory and material purchasing, to support our R&D department with product engineering and design, and to help our HR team in their search for new talent.”
“We’ve shortened our customer support response time by 30 percent. … And more importantly, customer satisfaction has increased by 10 points.”
Robert Osojnik: IT Manager, EK Water Blocks
Source: Slovenian premium liquid cooling products manufacturer meets customer demand faster with AI
