AI-powered support boosts sales and satisfaction at Total Expert

For financial institutions that guide their customers through major, life-changing financial decisions—like securing a mortgage or planning for retirement—establishing deep customer relationships is essential. Total Expert, a CRM and customer engagement platform that empowers these institutions in those relationships, needed a better way to provide timely, accurate customer support.

Although Total Expert’s external business was booming, the company faced significant internal challenges. Existing customer support processes were inundated with an avalanche of tickets and new requests—far beyond what they could handle manually. Agents relied on a mix of outdated tools and time-consuming processes. The company lacked practical self-service options and struggled with slow response times.

With the help of AI-powered tools in Freshworks’ suite of customer service products, Total Expert has resolved more than 50,000 annual tickets, saved over 1,000 working hours for agents and teams, and realized an impressive 248% ROI in customer service operations.

The company

Named one of Inc. 5000 fastest-growing companies, Total Expert is a customer engagement platform trusted by over 200 banks, lenders, credit unions, and insurance companies. The Minneapolis-based company’s CRM platform helps financial teams understand their customers at a deeper level and use those insights to improve business outcomes. 

The challenge

Heide Antholz, Total Expert’s SVP of professional services, joined the company over six years ago during the organization’s early stages of growth. At that time, the customer support team relied on a makeshift set of tools, including Gainsight, Smartsheet, and Guru, which lacked the scalability required as the company began to grow. “Our support framework was young, with only a few people and no tools,” she says. “We knew that a process built around manual spreadsheets and hours-long wait times would never scale.”

Response times were longer than seven days during peak periods, leaving customers in the dark about crucial details regarding mortgages, loan terms, and other financial products. Part-time agents were added to cover periods of high ticket volume, but this barely moved the needle on customer outcomes. The support team also lacked comprehensive knowledge documentation, and frontline agents often could not provide clear answers or consistent, on-brand guidance. Evolving support operations was necessary but required buy-in from senior leadership.

“We heard repeatedly from customers that when they reached out with questions, they expected to be known and understood by our support team,” Antholz says. With the help of a value realization exercise with Freshworks, it became clear that AI-powered solutions like Freddy AI Copilot would increase personalization, improve response quality, and bolster efficiency and productivity—all of which made it attractive to company leadership.

The solution

Freshdesk was implemented to power Total Expert’s Tier 1 and Premium customer support teams with a highly customized service portal that customers access through the main website. Tickets are created and automatically routed to specific teams based on set qualifications, allowing the company to handle a steady stream of requests at varying levels of urgency.

To free up agents’ time, Total Expert rolled out the Freddy AI chatbot using a brand-friendly acronym: TED (“TE Digital Assistant”). TED is the first line of defense on the company’s service platform, easily resolving low-priority questions and automatically routing premium enterprise customers to live agents.

Freddy AI has helped customers self-serve in two ways: through AI chatbots and an updated knowledge base (also used to train TED). The TE User Knowledge Base answers many simple how-to questions, freeing up technical resources for more urgent product-related problems. The robust knowledge base also helps agents get the info they need to better serve customers.

Customers who need to connect with a live agent have better experiences thanks to Freddy AI Copilot. Using features like Tone Enhancer, Summarizer, and Text Rephraser, Total Expert can ensure consistent, accurate responses aligned with the company’s brand voice.

• Summarizer quickly gives agents a summarized view of a customer’s full history. “For our agent, it makes them more knowledgeable and able to deliver the answers our customers are looking for right out of the gate,” says Antholz.

• Tone Enhancer helps maintain a consistent and empathetic tone throughout the agents’ interactions.

• Text Rephraser rewords agents’ responses to adhere to customer service standards and the brand voice.

Although leaders initially viewed Freshdesk as a much-needed solution for ticketing challenges, they quickly saw how to maximize that initial investment for even greater impact. 

“Being a customer-facing support agent or engineer can be one of the most challenging roles in a company,” says Antholz. “So anything we could do to help them be more successful in servicing that customer is a win for the customer. That’s how we presented AI, and that has proven to be true.”

With Freshworks’ premium support offering, Total Expert’s dedicated enterprise technical account manager was able to help implement the solutions they needed to best serve their business.

With active integrations that include Slack and Jira, Freshdesk helps agents work with favorite tools to boost agency productivity, notify admins about high-priority issues, and loop in the engineering team for technical bug fixes. 

With Freshdesk, built on Neo Platform and powered by AWS, Total Expert has expanded its support capacity, brought all customer-support-related activities onto one powerful platform, and gained a holistic view of thousands of customer interactions. This has helped to reduce ticket volume and increase the number of tickets agents can handle in less time.

Impact

What was once a mountain of slow service requests has been transformed into a customer-friendly support machine. Not only has Freshdesk helped Total Expert reduce ticket volume and resolve 23% of messages via AI chatbots, it has also enabled agents to trim interaction time to under 20 minutes. Additionally, the new and improved knowledge base has proven to be extremely popular among staff, underscoring the value of self-service for both agent productivity and speedy customer inquiries.

“We are getting rave reviews,” says Antholz. “And we hear that in the sales process, our support is a game-changer and a differentiator in bringing in new customers and keeping our existing ones.”

Total Expert has enjoyed a 248% ROI from improved customer service productivity and savings of more than $124,000 annually, demonstrating financial and process-related gains over time.

Antholz says that these returns not only help showcase Freshdesk’s value to executives but also pave the way for future innovation. “With Freshworks, the sky's the limit,” she says. “We’re gaining an intimate understanding of our organization and developing a new vision for how to serve our customers in an AI-powered future.”