Tata 1mg case study
Tata 1mg pioneers a modern customer communication experience in e-pharmacy
Tata 1mg
Tata 1mg is a healthcare platform on a mission to make healthcare understandable, accessible, and affordable for all people living in India. The company was founded in 2015 to provide accurate, authoritative, and trustworthy information on medicines and to help people use their medicines effectively and safely. Tata 1mg healthcare services include e-pharmacy, diagnostics, e-consultation, and health content. 1mg delivers medicines and other health products to homes in 1800+ cities across India from licensed and verified pharmacies. Additionally, 1mg provides diagnostic services from certified labs and online doctor consults at any time, from anywhere.
Challenged by the surge of customer inquiries
As an e-pharma company, 1mg received a high volume of inquiries related to the pandemic in 2020. The company received numerous customer questions about COVID tests and what kind of medicines can be used. That’s when the company decided to implement chat in its app. Given the urgency of the pandemic, the development team needed to implement a chat solution in its apps and take it to market quickly to allow its customer service agents to respond to the deluge of customer inquiries. The solution also needed to reliably scale to hundreds of thousands of users and securely handle sensitive health information.
“At the peak of the pandemic, we were seeing more than 300-thousand unique chat interactions per month in our application,” explains Kartik Raina who is the Engineering Manager for CX divisions at Tata 1mg. “This is unique chat interactions, not even the total number of chats which would be much higher. Our agents would handle 200 chats at a given time, so the performance and reliability of our chat service is mission critical to our business as an e-pharma company.”
Why Sendbird Chat
Tata 1mg chose Sendbird for the simplicity of its chat implementation and reliable performance at scale handling sensitive health information across multiple app platforms. “We are using Sendbird for the seamless connectivity and the interactions that happen not just on the web application, but also on our Android and iOS applications,” reports Raina.
“Our customer communications involve different customers on different platforms and agents that are located at different locations, so it is tricky for us to take care of so many aspects. Sendbird gives us a platform where all customers, agents and chatbot can interact with each other seamlessly without my team having to worry about it.”
Kartik Raina, Engineering Manager
The Sendbird solution
Sendbird Chat is primarily how Tata 1mg interacts with customers. When a customer has a question, they will first interact with a chatbot 1mg built themselves and integrated with Sendbird Chat. The chatbot automatically gives the customer a few options to select from to understand the matter of concern in an attempt to help the customer find an immediate answer through self-service. When the chatbot is not able to address the concern of the customer, the 1mg solution built with Sendbird will add a live customer service agent into that same channel initiated with the chatbot. So in this case, the chatbot will leave and the agent will enter into the chat channel. The live agent will then attempt to help the customer.
Once a customer chart is closed, a certain disposition has been agreed upon. Tata 1mg has a group of supervisors who look into the chat transcripts and see if the correct disposition was applied and if the conversation was handled correctly. There are some interactions which can be sensitive from the perspective of health reports. Sometimes agents are dealing with patients or relatives of the patients. This requires the agent to show a certain amount of empathy. The chat transcripts help Tata 1mg monitor the agent and customer interactions to ensure compliance, optimize performance and provide a positive customer experience.
Sendbird Chat is integrated into 1mg’s homegrown customer dashboard that houses all customer information as well as its ticketing system to route customer requests to agents. All of these systems are integrated into a solution to communicate and support customers in the Tata 1mg app.
Business benefits of building with Sendbird
As a healthcare service provider, Tata 1mg’s business depends on its customer interactions to be successful. Partnering with a reliable service like Sendbird for in-app chat offers the engineering team peace of mind. According to Raina, “By integrating Sendbird Chat in our app, we are helping our customers to get the right answers they are looking for when and where they need them. Our business depends on all of these customer interactions to be successful. In this way, Sendbird supports our mission to make healthcare more accessible.”
Another big benefit of using Sendbird is that the Tata 1mg engineering team can focus on what’s more strategic for its business instead of worrying about maintaining the chat service. For example, Raina reports that the engineering team has had time to optimize the user experience of its post order screens in its applications.
“Sendbird gives us the flexibility to grow more from the engineering aspect, where we can think beyond maintainability. The engineering bandwidth it would take to create, maintain, and update a system like Sendbird would take away from building and innovating new products, new services, and making our customer experience better.”
Kartik Raina, Engineering Manager