Propelus speeds down the automation highway

The continuing education (CE) process can be overwhelming, especially for professionals in healthcare who must stay current with required training and education to renew their licenses and ensure compliance with licensing boards.

Propelus aims to alleviate some of the stress. Its CE Broker solution streamlines the CE process by connecting licensing boards, education providers, and licensed professionals all on a single platform, making it easier for licensees to complete their continuing education.

Doubling down on CX

Because of the importance and complexity of CE, Propelus never stops working to improve its customer support operations.

As part of this commitment, in May 2023, Propelus swapped out its disparate Intercom, Freshdesk, and HelpScout customer support platforms for the omnichannel support and automation capabilities of Zendesk Suite.

The move transformed Propelus’ ability to help its customers: first response times for chats dropped by 80 percent—from 10-plus minutes to less than two minutes—and time to full resolution for chats was cut in half. In just five months, Propelus saved more than 1,100 support hours.

But upgrading its infrastructure was just the start of Propelus’ automation journey. For Senior Director of Customer Support, Meg Smith, great CX requires ongoing attention and refinement. Today she focuses on continuous improvement projects like scaling support, optimizing workflows, and doubling down on customer self-service with AI.

“CE can be really stressful for people,” says Smith. “Often they’re not sure what to do—they’re just reacting to what the regulation boards are telling them to do. So we have to provide them with answers and information quickly, and handle our conversations with care.”

Smith’s support team consists of 25 front-line agents. On average, each agent handles 775 queries per month.

A jump start on automation

To serve more customers more efficiently, Propelus wanted to tap AI. The company started its automation journey with a hybrid approach, whereby its AI agents address FAQ-style questions using generative AI, and answer more sophisticated queries based on conversation flows.

The first task was to identify customers’ most common intents about continuing education for the AI agent to recognize. Propelus’ use cases included:

— CE reporting, for licensees who want to report their course completions and education providers who report on the licensees’ behalf.

— CE compliance, for licensees who request which CE requirements are required and/or missing.

— Billing and Subscription management, for licensees who want to manage their subscription, upgrade their account, cancel a free trial, cancel auto-renew, request receipts, or update billing information.

Next, to address more complex questions, the team built conversation flows for each intent, aimed at resolving the issue. As a final step, the team added generative replies for FAQs by connecting the AI agent to the company’s knowledge base. When customers ask questions, the AI agent scans the knowledge base for answers and delivers a summarized response.

Flexible AI agents for different persona

Propelus launched its hybrid AI agents in April 2024.

Today, when customers visit the website, they’re asked to identify themselves as either licensed professionals or education providers. Depending on their role, they interact with the AI agent in different ways.

Licensed professionals move into a conversation workflow with scripted replies. The AI agent asks what they need help with and then guides them, step-by-step, to a resolution. Education providers also move into a conversation workflow, with GPT nodes in place at strategic points to help fill in the blanks when the scripted response is not applicable.

Saving months of work

Today, Propelus boasts a 43 percent automation rate. Its new AI agents fully managed 3,344 conversations in the first three months—roughly 44 percent more per month than a human agent handles. The support team saved 2,480 hours over the course of seven months, or the equivalent of two full time employees for that time period. What’s more, Propelus’ bot satisfaction (BSAT) score is a solid 90 percent.

“The AI agents provide a lot of information and people really appreciate it,” says Smith. “Our AI agents answer the easy questions to free up human agents for creative problem solving. If someone needs to talk to a human, our escalation is effortless.”

The introduction of AI also led to the creation of a new role at Propelus: self-service manager. The manager works across all three of Propelus’ help centers and brands, optimizing the content for both the humans and AI agents. The self-service manager also works hands-on with the AI agents, making performance refinements and improvements based on a confusion matrix.

“AI is creating new roles and opportunities,” says Smith. “Some people think that AI will take jobs, but it’s the opposite.”

Up next: reaching 80 percent with automations

For even higher levels of automation, Propelus will soon be connecting its backend systems using APIs that push, pull, and parse data for its AI agent responses. With the ability to verify subscription levels, credit card information, email addresses, and other account-related details, the AI agents can resolve common queries from start to finish, without any human intervention.

All customer information will be accessed securely, ensuring privacy and data protection at every step of the process.

In September to October 2024, the company implemented zero-training for all three of its AI agents. Zero-training AI agents use generative AI-powered use cases to understand a customer’s query and link to the appropriate dialogues, without relying on expressions as a training dataset. This makes them faster to set up and easier to maintain. For Smith, the preliminary results are promising.

Propelus also plans on adding email and webforms as channels. The move reflects a key step in Zendesk’s Road to +80%, a roadmap for advancing automation and integrating AI in customer support.

Road to +80% outlines how companies can quickly achieve 10 percent automation by using generative AI to create a knowledge base and launch an AI agent. For 20 percent, they can add conversation flows to control and customize responses to more sophisticated queries. By using APIs to integrate AI agents with backend systems, companies can realize a 40 percent automation rate. And to reach 80%+ automation, they can expand AI to new use cases and channels.

Today, AI is Propelus’ CX differentiator. Says Smith, “Innovation can happen everywhere, especially in CX.”