Threado AI answers 73% of the queries for the Support Driven team

About

Support Driven is an online community of more than 13,000 members who care deeply about support. They ask questions, share expertise, and help each other via the Support Driven Slack and at events like SD Expo and SD Leadership Summit. Support Driven as a company is small and exists to serve its community of customer support professionals.

Company Size

2 - 10 Employees

Funding

None

Industry

SaaS, Support

From a podcast to a community

Scott Tran worked as a developer back in 2013 when he attended a conference for product support professionals which became a turning point in his life. He realized people were doing amazing things in product support which became the basis for the Support Driven podcast that started that same year. Through these podcast interviews, Scott talked to a lot of folks, and through one such conversation he realized that when you facilitate connections between support professionals, they start organizing meetups and networking amongst themselves. This is how the Support Driven community essentially came to life.

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Quality over quantity, any day

When the Support Driven community started, it was just Scott and another member talking about their everyday curiosities. Gradually, people started joining them. It took over 6 months to get their first 100 members but that was okay because the quantity was never a concern for Scott. In fact, initially, there only was one channel on Slack where people talked about everything.

“Think of it this way - if you’re hosting a house party, and you have like 10 people there, wouldn’t you rather have them all in one room instead of opening up 10 different rooms and not have any engagement?” - Scott Tran

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This brilliant idea is what fostered engagement in the community early on. It wasn’t until the community started scaling that they gave more structure to it and introduced more channels. Today, Support Driven is a 10K+ member community that goes way beyond Slack channels. They have the Support Driven Expo which is a two-day event focusing on developing skills and strategies to improve product support. Support Driven Leadership Summit is another conference that focuses on building connections in the community. In addition to this, they also have a mentorship program that allows younger and newer support professionals to learn the industry secrets.

How does Support Driven use Threado?

The Support Driven community has started recently using the Threado AI bot in their community and also embedded the bot on their website to answer any questions about the Support Driven Expo. This helps alleviate trivial tasks from the Support Driven team and instead helps them focus on complex issues that require a human touch.

Apart from an AI-led approach, Support Driven has been able to automate initial interactions with members who join the community. They have 3 workflows that help new members navigate the community better -

The first workflow is to ensure that members have read and agree to their internal code of conduct that supports an inclusive environment so members feel welcomed.
The second workflow shares a welcome message with members when they join the channel dedicated to a jobs board. Since the community focuses immensely on helping people with their professional careers in support, they introduce new members to the job board where members can share as well as look for jobs.
Another workflow lets members know about events and invites members to sign up for the event newsletter that goes out once a month.

Apart from workflows that introduce people to the community, the team also has a workflow that sends them a Slack alert whenever someone posts a message in the Slack community. This helps them stay on top of all the messages that are posted and respond to them right away.

What changes did Support Driven see?

Over 73% of the queries answered by AI

Since the team at Support Driven started using the Threado AI bot in their community, a total of 41 queries from 56 have been answered by the bot.

With the help of the Threado AI bot, the team has been able to reduce the average time taken to respond to questions by almost 50% in the past 4 months to about 6 hours.

For context, according to our Community Benchmark Report ‘23, the average response time in Professional Communities is a little over 37 hours and for communities with 10,000+, the average time is about 24 hours.

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Time taken to answer queries down by 50%

The First Response Time (FRT) is an important metric that represents the swiftness of a support team. The lower the FRT is, the higher would be the customer satisfaction and accounts for a better experience altogether.

Using Threado AI (with instant replies), the Support Driven team has been able to reduce their average FRT from 12 hours to just 6 hours in less than 4 months. And this change was seen to be effective within a month of using Threado’s AI bot for their support.

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11% more members were activated in 3 months

Support Driven focuses on organically getting people to become a part of and engage in the community through quality content, connections, and events. With Threado, engaging with the community has become easier which has accounted for a decent growth over the last 3 months.

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7% more questions were answered

Being a community rooted in providing excellent customer support, the support that is offered within the community plays a vital role in fostering engagement while ensuring that people have their questions answered.

Threado helps not only filter but also address community questions directly from the dashboard, which makes it easier to stay on top of questions asked in the community and respond to them. This amazing community that already answers about 65% of questions increased that number by 7%.

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Churn has decreased by 20% in 4 months

A lower churn indicates that members are finding the community valuable enough to stay a part of it. A lot of factors go into maintaining and eventually improving member interest in the community like onboarding, engagement, content, connections, and more.

The Support Driven community already has a low churn rate compared to the industry standards at about 4% and was able to further decrease that by 20% in the past 4 months.

The future of Support Driven

Support Driven has never relied on outbounds to scale its community. Part of the “quality over quantity” mantra is to always maintain word-of-mouth inbound into the community where people are able to discover the value for themselves instead of having to ask to come and see it. Even after a decade, the Support Driven community has managed to be authentic and true to the ideologies that defined it.

What lies ahead for the community is more initiatives like expos and conferences. Through the years, the conferences have been an amazing source of spreading the word about Support Driven as a dedicated community for all support professionals. They plan on continuing to bring new ideas to improve these events and their impact. With all the amazing folks in the community, they’re focusing on leveraging these talents to ramp up content efforts and ideas.