Structured is a day planning app that helps users manage their calendars, form to-do lists, and track their habits in one unified view. In just four years, the app has accrued over 20 million downloads and supports roughly 1.5 million monthly active users spread across the globe.
Since its launch, Structured has maintained an impressive 4.8 rating on the Apple App Store. Of its 500,000 ratings, over half are 5 stars. For an app that popular, you’d expect a hefty support team. But the Structured staff is extremely lean — 13 people total, with only one full-time employee dedicated to support.
Front’s AI-powered chatbot fills in the gaps, fielding easier questions in seconds and escalating tougher ones to their top-tier support person, keeping Structured customers satisfied and productive.
Challenge
Structured strives to make day planning “refreshingly simple,” and its features have constantly evolved to meet that goal. While these iterations lead to a better user experience, they can sometimes lead to customer confusion, necessitating customer support.
With limited resources, the company couldn’t staff a huge team. So Kevin Kimmig, Director of Communications at Structured, began looking for a tool to help him and one full-time hire prioritize and resolve customer inquiries as efficiently as possible.
In Denmark, where Kevin is based, Dixa is widely used. Yet Kevin found that its rigid queueing structure and pricing plan couldn’t accommodate the needs of a small team.
Dixa has what I would call very strict direction: you can only answer inquiries when you have a queue. We wanted to prioritize requests our way, with a full view of every inbox.
So, he started searching for an alternative — one with more backend customization options, full visibility over inboxes, and prioritization functionality. Ideally, this tool would also leverage the robust help article library he and his team member had worked hard to build.
Solution
Front was a front-runner in Kevin’s evaluation. The platform was both flexible and feature-full. Plus, its chatbot could connect customer questions to specific help articles — without human intervention. A proof of concept sealed the deal.
When we started a Front trial, the setup was quite easy, and I really liked the streamlined UI, so we decided to go with it.
Always-on support for a global user base with automated chatbot flows
It’s impossible for Structured’s one-person support rep to be everywhere all at once. But with users in nearly every time zone, she needed a way to answer user questions without actually being online.
The solution? Front’s always-on chatbot. Instead of using it for traditional live chat, the rep and Kevin designed three different flows based on what the customer wanted to do:
Report a problem.
Learn how to do something.
Leave feedback.
Each path automatically pulls in a relevant article from the Structured knowledge base, so users gain instant answers to their questions — even when Structured’s rep is off the clock.
Built-in escalation to prioritize personalized responses
For most questions, a help article will suffice. If not, the chatbot asks a series of multiple-choice questions to better understand the user’s intent and issue. Any unanswerable questions get forwarded to Structured’s support email.
If we offered live chat, we’d need a huge staff to accommodate our growing user base, but we just have one person, so it makes more sense to use chat to serve up help articles to give users immediate help and escalate everything else to our rep’s inbox.
The chatbot acts as a first line of defense so Structured’s sole rep can take her time providing users with detailed answers to complicated questions, reporting bugs to the proper dev team members, and resolving pricing problems with a personal touch. This extra level of care is apparent in Structured’s raving App Store Reviews and makes the product stand out among its competition.
Super-charging chatbot responses with AI
Kevin and his rep were early beta testers of Front’s AI reply functionality, wanting to serve up written explanations to user questions rather than just linking to an article.
When the feature dropped, Kevin and his rep got to work, updating chatbot flows so that:
Users got AI-formed answers based on information in the knowledge base.
The chatbot would continue to ask users questions like, “What about your inquiry was not solved?” and revise its answers based on the additional data it received.
The difference in answer quality was so palpable that customers commented on it in their reviews. Kevin notes, “We started getting App Store reviews saying how good our chatbot is compared to others our customers have used in the past.”
Doing more with less, thanks to Front
It’s not easy to offer good customer service with one full-time employee. But with Front’s chatbot, Structured is making it happen.
Mobile apps, in general, have very poor customer service. In our category, we’re definitely offering the best customer service. That’s what sets us apart.
In fact, Structured’s chatbot is working so well that the team has been able to put off hiring a second full-time rep. Kevin shares, “Before the Front chatbot launched, we thought a lot about hiring a second agent. How we’ve got everything set up now, we’ve realized we don’t need one.”
Looking to the future, Kevin plans to maximize Structured’s use of Front’s AI features to serve the company’s next million of happy planners.
