Customer Success Story: Rippling + Decagon

Rippling eliminates the friction from running a business by combining HR, IT, and Finance apps on a unified platform. There are over 10,000 customers across various industries that use Rippling as their company’s single source of truth for employee data. With over 400,000 users to support, Rippling needed a robust AI agent solution to accurately and quickly address their users’ complex questions and situations.

Prior to Decagon, Rippling was using a solution that relied on a decision-tree-based platform. This type of product requires heavier manual human oversight and management, effectively limiting how well Rippling could scale and differentiate its support operations for an ever-growing and diversified customer base. When the Rippling team decided to find a new solution, they needed one that could provide:

1. More Accurate Responses: Rippling has complex products (HR, Payroll, IT management) requiring specific, time-sensitive responses. For instance, termination flows vary in complexity based on company policies. Their previous solution couldn't provide in-depth, dynamic, human-like responses tailored to customer processes.
2. Conversational Flexibility: The previous solution, relying on decision trees and pre-scripted answers, struggled with vague questions (e.g., "W-2 issue"). This led to incorrect workflows and delayed issue resolution.
3. Complex Tagging and Routing Workflows: Accurate ticket routing is crucial for directing questions to specialized teams, especially for Rippling's multiple, complex products. The previous AI solution often routed to the wrong teams, causing delays in customer support.
4. Dedicated Engineering Capacity: Building a customizable AI Agent is complex. Rippling needed a partner with engineering resources to drive custom API workflows, allowing their team to focus on product development.

As a result, Rippling found it difficult to provide customers with the right support experience. Customers were only able to self-serve their issues around 38% of the time in chat and had no access to AI agents in email. With this in mind, the Rippling team decided to look for an AI solution that would enable them to provide higher-quality support responses in seconds.

Rippling approached the Decagon team with a clear list of criteria that were missing from their previous solution. They ultimately chose Decagon’s AI agents because we outperformed other solutions on several axes:

1. Higher Response Accuracy Rates: In addition to learning from existing knowledge bases and past tickets, Decagon also connects to Rippling's internal APIs to generate human-like responses that take into account the user's specific situation. For example, if an admin is asking about an employee's healthcare enrollment status, Decagon can pull in that information from Rippling and answer that question directly with higher accuracy and no human intervention. This increased chat deflection from 38% to over 50%.
2. More Conversational Flexibility: Using generative AI, Decagon's AI agents can understand the customer's question and respond contextually, all in a timely and efficient manner. Decagon will also ask clarifying questions to make sure it's understanding the user correctly and take actions on behalf of the user, leading to faster resolution times.
3. Complex Tagging, Routing, and Escalation Workflows: With over 12 core products, creating a scalable tagging and routing system was necessary to accurately direct conversations to the right subject-matter experts. Rippling collaborated closely with Decagon's engineering team to identify 75+ tags, apply the appropriate routing, and identify scenarios where escalation was required. This led to an immediate 7% improvement in customer conversation routing.
4. Forward-Deployed Engineering Support: With direct access to Decagon's world-class engineering team, Rippling is now able to build out custom API workflows and quickly address customer issues. In one instance, Rippling had to quickly deprecate an existing product — within a day, Decagon was able to replace that tool with our Agent Assist product and immediately incorporate Rippling's brand tone.

“The Decagon team’s commitment, responsiveness, and on-the-ground engineering support were crucial to the successful rollout of our AI agents. Their ability to quickly deploy solutions, build custom workflows, and integrate seamlessly with our systems has played a significant role in our mutual success. Working with them to elevate our customer support has been a truly positive experience.” says Gage Bartholomew, Support Operations Manager.

With Decagon’s support, the Rippling team saw an immediate ability to scale and differentiate their customer support operations while also improving deflection rates. These deflection numbers continue to improve thanks to the custom workflows, API integrations, and other enhancements Decagon and Rippling have built to streamline their customer support operations.

“Our team has deepened our chat support capabilities, launched AI-enabled email deflection, improved our ticket routing, and leveraged AI Assist tooling to maintain quality support responses from our agents,” says Jonathan Fisher, Support Operations Program Manager. “Needless to say, we’re seeing a huge impact from Decagon in being able to scale to an ever-growing Rippling customer base. All thanks to Decagon’s generative AI approach and their extremely collaborative team. I’m excited to continue working with the team to keep raising the bar for our customers!”

Want to scale your customer support operations with a customizable AI agent? Reach out to the Decagon team at sales@decagon.ai.