Customer service automation with Google and Botcopy
Riot Games’ chatbot built on Google Cloud Dialogflow & Botcopy achieves a 14% deflection rate.
Riot Games tests Dialogflow and Botcopy stack against Amazon Lex. Google and Botcopy win hands down, and now Riot’s new chatbot deflects 14% of escalations within the first months of deployment.
“We love working with Botcopy; it’s been awesome testing with Botcopy versus Amazon, especially during prototyping. Within three months of working with Botcopy, we determined that the project is worth investing in using Google. With Amazon, we had to build the UI, and it was really janky.”
— Rai Medeiros, Product Manager, Riot Games
As a reminder, Botcopy provides a frontend web and mobile app interface for Google Cloud Dialogflow, so we’re Google Cloud Partners, and we get to work with big and small companies every day. One of our favorites is Riot Games, one of the world’s most innovative game developers, publishers, and esports tournament organizers. Click the image below to see our interview with Riot Games.
Just because something is brilliant doesn’t mean companies will be bold enough to do it. But with Riot Games, their brilliance is rivaled only by their boldness. In this Botcopy (and Google Cloud Platform) case study, Riot writes the book on how to ramp up an AI initiative for customer service. It’s a story about data, testing, vision, more testing, teamwork, provable ROI, and Riot’s commitment to offering the best service to their end-users.
How big is Riot Games?
Consider that League of Legends recently clocked ~115 million active monthly players around the world. (Minecraft has ~125 million.) League of Legends is just one of Riot’s titles; they also have Valorant, which clocked in at ~14 million active monthly players this year. Add in the rest of Riot’s roster, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the massive opportunities to automate when its users need support.
How Botcopy made this case study, and who helped:
Thanks to Rai Medeiros at Riot Games for the interview and her team’s outstanding work, and Dhruv Thukral and Debbie Khaw at Google for their exceptional guidance and support in rolling out the Riot solution with us.
The short video segment above features our CEO Dustin Dye and highlights a longer talk with Rai aired on Chatbot Conference Online, 2021, organized by the great Stefan Kojouharov.
Here’s the skinny:
Problem: Riot Games’ players submit thousands upon thousands of tickets and have to talk to live agents to resolve relatively simple issues before gamers can get back to gaming. This process slows everyone down and costs Riot (and its customers) time and money.
Solution: Riot found a clever way to automate a lot of these issues without compromising on having an outstanding UX. The answer? An intelligent chatbot built with Google Dialogflow (backend) and Botcopy (frontend UI) that can authenticate users and solve many common user problems instantly, saving oceans of time and money and making Riot gamers happy. For Riot, their players come first. 👊
What Riot did and why. (And how YOU can do it, too.)
Riot Games’ PM, Rai Medeiros explains:
“We’re a ticket-based company, so the user experience for our players is that if you want to resolve an issue nine times out of ten, you would either go to an FAQ or have to submit a ticket. All of our metrics are driven towards deflection. Our goal is to make sure users don’t need to speak to an agent.”
At Botcopy, we find that most of our enterprise customers are in a similar boat. They’re with one of the big cloud vendors, and each has their offering for AI-powered chat, e.g., Microsoft Luis, Amazon Lex, Google Dialogflow.
Riot Games was an AWS customer, but they became intrigued by the Dialogflow and Botcopy stack during due diligence. As a test, they pitted Dialogflow/Botcopy against Lex and a custom frontend. Rai explains:
“We built two of the same bots across both platforms for solving tech tickets. With Google Dialogflow, we could dive deep into the logs and identify what we needed to build to meet customer needs faster. That was one of the reasons we ended up picking Google as a solution.”
Yes! 👏 We’ve always felt Dialogflow was the best. But to reach its potential, it requires a rich content frontend. Botcopy is the enterprise-grade front-end SaaS product designed for Google Dialogflow CX and ES. That’s why Botcopy is a pivotal layer for Riot — or anyone else who uses Dialogflow, for that matter. Here’s Rai’s take on it:
“We love working with Botcopy; it’s been awesome testing with Botcopy versus Amazon, especially during prototyping. It was interesting to see how you could scale with Botcopy and Google quickly.”
In addition to providing the SaaS, we helped Riot in other ways as part of our full-service Pro Plan. Rai explains:
“With Botcopy and Google we could throw the bot up on our website rather quickly. With Amazon, we had to build the frontend UI, and it was really janky. We love working with Botcopy.”
– Rai Medeiros, Riot Games
Botcopy may very well have played a non-trivial role in bringing Riot Games (a subsidiary of Tencent — the 9th most valuable company in the world!) from AWS to the GCP…at least for the global AI initiative. We’re happy because we love Google for AI cloud tech. We see this playing out time and again, as enterprise companies find Botcopy and invariably get led deeper into the GCP ecosystem as a result.
#cloudwars 😎
“While most of our engineers had originally started with ‘yeah Amazon’s going to fit our needs.’ The higher-level testing allowed us to test for scale and ease of implementation, and that ultimately convinced them to side with the Google and Botcopy stack.”
Riot’s tests with Botcopy included:
- Authenticating players.
- Giving player data.
- Recognizing how users asked for GDPR data.
Results:
14% additional deflection rate against tickets. And this all in the first months of testing, before any long-term optimization. Impressive! Rai says it best:
“It’s amazing to see. We have definitive answers, like, here’s my flow for how people normally submit tickets. Here’s my flow for when they interact with the bot, and we’re able to pull out every bot interaction that submitted a ticket to go and target and reconstruct those flows to make sure users stop submitting tickets for those issues.”
That there are operational cost savings is obvious. But also consider the opportunity cost of gamers wasting time (often days) getting help when they could be playing. But there’s even more to it than that. Riot is giving its end-users a beautiful experience with no hassles.
Getting the message out in many languages.
Riot’s support pages are translated into 22 languages. Fortunately, Botcopy can trigger the correct language by detecting the browser preference of the end-user and passing that setting thru to Dialogflow. Google is renowned for supporting many languages, so the Google/Botcopy combo is ideal for multilingual chatbots. Rai expands on this:
If you can prove that it works in one language, you can invariably prove that it works for all other languages. All of our localization teams around the world will translate every word we give them into the ‘Riot-appropriate’ phrasing, and they’ll add the ‘Riot-appropriate’ flair.
Good to know Riot is taking its chatbot “A-game” across the globe.
Riot’s parting advice: be data-driven.
As the bot industry matures, companies like Riot Games are proving value. That’s an encouraging trend in a sector (chatbots) that’s often misunderstood. Nothing like quantifiable proof to make the case that bots are here to stay! Rai sums this up nicely:
“We had to have a very data-driven approach to prove deflection from a very early stage to prove to our regional stakeholders that this was an investment worth making.”
— Rai Medeiros, Product Manager, Riot Games
Botcopy’s software brings the most advanced conversational AI to your website or app in one click. Build your agent’s back-end with top AI (e.g., Google Cloud Dialogflow) and run Botcopy as a whip-smart front-end custom UI that puts YOU in control. Our $19 Lite Plan or $65 Gold Plan can potentially save your company millions. And if you’d like to “Go Pro” and receive volume discounts and enterprise-level services, you’ll be in great company. Botcopy currently serves dozens of Fortune 500 companies, large orgs, govs and edus. Join them! Get in touch.
