How AI Transformed Smartsheet's Customer Support from Hours to Minutes

AI-Powered Customer Support: Smartsheet's Six-Minute Solution

Customer support expectations vary, but taking hours to resolve issues is never ideal for maintaining client goodwill. At Smartsheet Inc., the journey from hours to minutes was a significant challenge until they implemented an artificial intelligence agent-driven solution.

Smartsheet uses Agentforce from Salesforce Inc. to help 13 million users get answers instantly, handling help desk and billing issues without wait times or tickets.

"We had to put AI into this to handle complex administrative tasks much faster," said James Watson, vice president of customer excellence at Smartsheet. "We use AI on the back side, we call it the back door, and we do all the research, we generate a response. All of that takes six minutes. We go from six hours to a six-minute experience, and that drives our customer satisfaction way up."

Continuous Learning for Customer Support

Smartsheet's embrace of AI agents was motivated by improving customer satisfaction and reducing operational strain. This required processing large amounts of unstructured data and training Agentforce to understand Smartsheet's work management terminology.

"Structured data is very easy... but the unstructured data, that's all of the cases we've done in the past," Watson explained. "We can use all that unstructured data, so we had to train Agentforce to do this. Now, we have this great data, unstructured and structured data, and we continue to feed it. Every case continues to feed that loop of learning."

One result of using AI agents is elevating customer support to a higher level of service. This improvement leads to a more proactive approach, leveraging AI to examine solutions beyond the immediate problem.

"Now that we have resolved your issue, what can we do next?" Watson said. "How can we expand it within the customer? That becomes a revenue-generating or cross-selling opportunity. We're working on this idea of how to use AI to really look at the entire solution."