Blueground accelerates customer support resolution time with Dust

About Blueground

Blueground is a leading provider of furnished apartment rentals for stays of 30+ days in major cities around the world. Their platform connects travelers and corporate clients with high-quality accommodations across five continents, eliminating the administrative friction typically associated with long-term rentals. With tens of thousands of apartments across their portfolio, Blueground serves a global market of corporate and individual clients seeking flexible, high-quality living experiences.

The company's customer experience department of 80 people manages support operations across multiple time zones and languages, handling thousands of customer interactions monthly.

Challenge: scaling support quality while reducing resolution times

As Blueground expanded globally, their customer experience team faced increasing pressure to maintain service excellence while handling growing support volumes. 

The support team struggled with:

• Extended resolution times impacting customer satisfaction and a growing backlog of unresolved tickets.
• Manual documentation searches across Google Drive and Slack, consuming the representatives’ time.
• Over-reliance on rigid Zendesk macros that required constant maintenance.
• Inconsistent communication quality between the representatives.
• Language barriers in global support operations.
• A low CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, hovering at 74% in October 2024.

These challenges had tangible impacts on business operations, with an average handling time of 23 minutes per ticket and full resolution times reaching 140 hours, affecting both team efficiency and guest satisfaction.

Solution: deploying specialized AI agents for enhanced support operations

After evaluating multiple AI platforms, Blueground chose Dust for three key advantages:

• Platform autonomy: The customer experience team could create and customize AI agents without relying on engineering resources.
• Simple integration: Direct connection with Zendesk through a custom app meant agents could access AI capabilities within their existing workflow.
• Rapid deployment: No-code implementation allowed the team to move from selection to production in under a week.

Led by their Customer Experience Director, Blueground developed a suite of specialized AI agents tailored to their support operations. Each agent was designed to address specific challenges in their customer service workflow while maintaining seamless integration with their Zendesk environment.

Response Agent (internal name: CommunicationPro)

This agent helps customer experience (CX) representatives draft responses to customer inquiries. It ensures all responses adhere to Blueground's warm and professional communication standards by connecting with their brand communication guidelines for both app chat and emails.

Representatives can access the Dust response agent directly from Zendesk, thanks to its integration via the Dust app. The agent automatically analyzes ticket data and customer inquiry details to draft appropriate, on-brand responses without requiring any manual prompting from CX representatives.

"The team immediately engaged with the CommunicationPro agent; more or less everybody uses it"
Panagiotis Parisis, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Blueground.

Case Context Assistant (internal name: CatchMeUp)

For complex customer cases involving multiple interactions, the CatchMeUp agent provides a structured synopsis of the ticket history, enabling support agents to quickly understand case context and previous actions taken. By eliminating the need to read through lengthy ticket histories, this agent significantly reduces the time needed for agents to get up to speed on ongoing cases.

Multilingual Support Agent (internal name: TranslationAgent)

Blueground's global operations require multilingual (Greek, English, Turkish, French, Spanish, German) support capabilities. Their translation agents handle translation across six languages while maintaining a consistent format and tone. It enables rapid responses in the customer's preferred language.

Results: significant improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency

The implementation of Dust AI agents has delivered a chain of improvements across Blueground's customer experience operations, leading to significant gains in both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Enhanced information accessibility transforms support capabilities

• Dust AI agents have instant access to Blueground's entire knowledge base, combining documentation, historical context, and real-time data in one unified system. This enables the Blueground support team to receive immediate, highly personalized, context-aware responses to each customer interaction, eliminating time spent browsing through G-drives and web resources.
• With richer context for each ticket response and standardization of replies, Blueground has improved consistency in customer interactions.

"Dust’s integration with Zendesk was very helpful. We were able to capitalize on Dust's AI capabilities, bringing them directly to the Coordinators workspace and eliminating any time previously spent on browsing through G-drives or the web." Panagiotis Parisis, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Blueground.

Streamlined workflows accelerate resolution times

Building on this enhanced access to information, Dust agents:

• Transformed manual processes into intelligent, automated workflows and eliminated dependency on rigid, high-maintenance macros.
• Contributed to a 14% improvement in average handling time, reducing it from 23 to 19.8 minutes per ticket.
• Enabled support agents to focus on complex problem-solving rather than routine tasks.

"Dust has revolutionized our CX operations by transforming much of our manual processes into intelligent, automated workflows."
Panagiotis Parisis, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Blueground

Higher quality and faster resolutions drive significant customer satisfaction gains

The combination of faster resolutions and enhanced response quality led to:

• Consistently higher quality communications, verified through Quality Assurance (QA) feedback.
• Standardized yet personalized customer interactions across all support channels with more precise and contextually relevant responses to customer inquiries.

The combination of Dust AI agents, enhanced team training, and refined internal processes helped drive CSAT scores from 74% to 81% within six months. The customer experience team recognizes Dust as a major catalyst in this transformation, particularly in areas of response time and communication consistency. 

"We have seen an increase in customer satisfaction and quality of communication based on QA feedback after the Dust implementation" notes Blueground's team.

This transformation has positioned Blueground's customer experience team to better handle their global growth while maintaining the high-touch service their customers expect. The successful implementation demonstrates how AI can enhance rather than replace human support, leading to better outcomes for both customers and support teams.