Anaconda Reduces Employee Support Response Times From Five Minutes to Thirty Seconds

Beth McClelland (00:00) If you're on the fence about Agent Press, I would say, give it a shot. We were on the fence and we did an A/B test. There is no harm in testing something. And that was really the approach that we took was, hey, let's try it. If it fails, it can fail. And we'll try it up against this other solution, and we'll see which performs better. And then we'll move forward with the better performing one. So, I'm just a big fan of taking a shot on it, and we have been really glad that we did. Beth McClelland, Anaconda, Vice President of People. before engaging with Agent Press, my business was dealing with a lot of requests incoming to the people team. We were running a really lean team at the time. And we were just spending a lot of time answering one-off requests to our people base at Anaconda. We wanted to serve our people really, really well. We wanted to get them the answers that they needed, but my team was getting pulled in all kinds of different directions, and we weren't able to the experience that we were hoping for and get them the answers that they needed to give them the best possible experience. we're an AI company, And so it was really important to us that we live what we preach. So I think that if we hadn't taken action, we really would have not been embodying the culture of AI and specifically agentic AI that we really espouse, want our customers to espouse, and want our employees to espouse. I think the other thing would be just a real loss of productivity. My team would continually be answering these one-off questions in Slack, as opposed to being able to really give their time and attention to the more strategic, more nuanced, more tricky cases. which is definitely where I want their time and attention. we have a goal as a company to have a best-in-class people experience. We want this to be a best-in-class culture. And so I think the last thing is that we wouldn't be able to provide the best-in-class experience for our people that we have promised for them. Just because we would be stuck answering Slack messages, which seems like such a silly reason to not be able to deliver on that promise. time is money and it definitely would have cost my team in terms of time. I actually found through our CEO. They had a relationship, our CEO was really impressed with their skill sets, what they were able to deliver, and told me, "hey, let's go out and hire them." So it didn't feel like, hey, I'm just talking to this bot that doesn't really understand. And that's ultimately why we decided to go with them. to this day, I feel like that was the right decision. Yeah, so what they built for us was actually a agent to be able to take questions coming in from our people from Slack. We have an "ask people" team Any employee can come and ask us questions at any time of day or night. And so they built for us an actual agent to be able to answer based on kind of a golden data set that we provided to them that gives accurate and up-to-date information. So after the launch, i would say, It's mainly time saved. And so we estimated that we get between 5 to 40 incoming requests a day. If each of those takes my team 5 minutes, that's between 25 and 200 minutes that my team is dedicating to this a day, writing their own answers. So 5 minutes per has dropped down to maybe 30 seconds, maybe 15 seconds incoming requests. it's a pretty significant cost savings to my team. there was actually this really cool interaction that the agent was having with an employee, and the employee had come forward and said, "hey, my spouse was recently laid off and I need to get healthcare now through Anaconda. you know, is that a qualifying event and how do I go about changing healthcare?" that may seem like a very simple question to ask, like, "hey, how do I get healthcare?" But actually what "ask kate" recognized was this is a really significant moment for this human. anytime that you are out of work or you're facing something like that. And so, it actually responded with quite a bit of empathy that I was really impressed with where it said, "i'm so sorry to hear that. Here's how we can get you going." And that's exactly what we're after is this really human experience that treats people as humans in these very raw life moments, and gets them the information that they need. So that was actually a really proud moment for me. they have been awesome to work with, to the extent where they have brought some of our internal teams in and showed them what they're doing so that we could start to train and educate our internal teams on how to do that. they've been awesome at kinda taking what my ideas are, and then making that into, like, an actionable roadmap. And they never, to their credit, they never say, "no Beth, we can't do that." it's more like, "here's how we could do that," or "here's when we could do that," or "here's what that might look like." so they've been amazing. really helpful in getting us to, like, a minimum viable product, and then how are we going to move this forward, and then what are kind of our achievable milestones in terms of launch? and just have been, like, incredible humans to work with so all around 10 out of 10.