Mad Paws is the #1 online Pet Sitting Community in Australia, where Pet Owners can find trusted Pet Sitters.
Mad Paws Leverages Brainfish to Optimize Support Team Efficiency and Deliver Unparalleled Customer Service
Mad Paws, a publicly traded company (ASX: MPA), is Australia's top online pet-sitting community, connecting pet owners with reliable pet sitters. Serving as a beacon of trust and reliability in the pet sitting industry, its rapid expansion in user base during 2022 and 2023 created a new set of challenges for the Sydney based company.
The Uphill Battle of Rapid Expansion
The exponential growth that Mad Paws experienced was a double-edged sword. Whilst propelling them to the forefront of Australia's pet-sitting industry, this amazing expansion posed its fair share of challenges. With their user base doubling between 2022 and 2023, their customer support team found themselves grappling with an overwhelming wave of customer inquiries. They had reached a critical inflection point where their service levels and reputation for excellence in customer care were at risk of being compromised.
Their initial thought was to augment their existing support team with three additional members, a common business reflex to rising customer inquiries. Yet, this was no easy feat. It meant not only soaring operational costs, but also investing substantial time and resources into recruitment, training, and supervision of the new employees. Let's not forget the time it would take for these new members to reach their peak performance. This proposed addition to staff was an expensive and time-consuming solution, and the company's leadership team recognised the need to explore alternate, more efficient strategies to adapt to their rapidly expanding user base.
Enter Brainfish
To combat this challenge, Mad Paws turned to Brainfish, an innovative AI Help Center platform. Brainfish imported Mad Paws' existing Zendesk content and collaborated with the team to create a custom, brand-aligned Help Center that could assist in handling their customer inquiries.
The Mad Paws team spent a few weeks testing answers using common customer questions, and adjusting content to suit. They also set up 2 next best actions, Zendesk Live Chat and Submit a Ticket - to ensure customers had a path to contact a human agent if there was an emergency or query that couldn’t be resolved online.
In its first week of live operation, thousands of users performed more than 1000 AI searches on the new platform. This instant adoption demonstrated the ease and effectiveness of the Brainfish Help Center along with its potential in aiding Mad Paws with their customer service efforts.
The Mad Paws team then followed the launch by setting up a spreadsheet to compare Brainfish results against all other channels. They analysed them weekly to look at where they could further promote their Brainfish Help Center placement to ensure customers used it as a first point of contact for support.
Rollout timeline
Doubling user base meant either +3 agents (slow, costly to hire and train) or a self-service layer that scales without headcount.
Brainfish ingested Mad Paws' existing Zendesk content and stood up a brand-aligned Help Center.
Team spent two weeks running real customer questions through the AI and refining content.
1,000+ AI searches in the first week, instant adoption, no training campaign needed.
Weekly reporting against other channels surfaced where to push Help Center placement so customers used it as the first stop.
80% deflection rate, 96% AI-answered, 22% fewer inbound tickets, 636% ROI inside 5 months.
Exceptional Outcomes Delivered By Brainfish
As of the present day, Mad Paws has managed to resolve queries of over 30,000 customers within the first 4 months, using Brainfish's AI-powered Help Center. This process led to an impressive 22% decrease in overall inbound ticket volume, a significant chunk of which was directly attributed to the implementation of Brainfish. Additionally, Brainfish consistently deflects 80% of Mad Paws customer self service queries, demonstrating its continued effectiveness in assisting the customer support team. At Madpaws, a high performing agent can handle up to 9 queries an hour -so without Brainfish, Madpaws would have needed to hire between 3-5 new agents to their team of 40 to manage these service levels.
Brainfish has served as a pivotal tool for Mad Paws, helping the company manage its operations more efficiently, scale its customer service without the need for additional personnel, and boost its overall customer satisfaction.
Key Outcomes At a Glance:
- 30,000+ customer queries resolved in 4 months
- 636% Return on Investment - an annualised payback period of 2 months!
- 22% decrease in overall inbound ticket volume
- 80% query deflection rate from human support
- 96% questions resulted in an AI generated answer.
Brainfish's transformative assistance has been instrumental for Mad Paws, not only boosting their operational efficiency but also enabling the seamless scalability of their customer service department – all without the need for additional personnel. Undeniably, Brainfish's value proposition is compelling, with an impressive 636% ROI realised in such a short period of time!
Through this partnership with Brainfish, Mad Paws has successfully harnessed their rapid growth. They've solidified their reputation for top-notch customer service and are on course for continued expansion, demonstrating what's possible when innovation meets commitment to customer satisfaction.