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Writer's picturePhoebe Nguyen

Optimizing customer support for Impossible Foods


Here is my week-long project about Impossible Foods. I did tons of research on the company, identified weaknesses in their customer success, and found ways to improve them.



About Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods is a US-based company that offers meat entirely made from plants. What separates them from other vegan/vegetarian food companies is that their products are extraordinarily identical to animal meat (ie. a typical veggie burger vs one that looks, tastes, and cooks like real meat). Their mission is to replace animal meat consumption with plant alternatives, to reduce the former's impact on climate change.



What can be improved

The weaknesses in customer success I identified with Impossible's website are:

  • There isn’t a convenient place where visitors could find information they are looking for. FAQs are scattered all over the website.

  • Navigating through the website to land on the FAQ page takes too many clicks.

  • For most questions, the FAQ page answers them in long, overly-detailed paragraphs, which visitors are unlikely to carefully read.

  • To receive help from the customer support team, the visitor would need to fill out a lengthy request form and wait for a reply within an unspecified time frame.

  • The existing AI-powered chatbot on some web-pages aren’t useful in most circumstances. They aren’t able to accurately comprehend the visitor’s question typed into the chatbot, which leads to an unhelpful reply.

In summary, the original Impossible Food's website doesn't conveniently answer enquiries, and getting help from the customer support team takes time.



Using Drift, TextExpander and copywriting to improve customer success


Here is a quick video of me summarizing how it works.


Drift

I used Drift to create a live chatbot. It should be displayed in the corner of every page on Impossible's website, particularly the home page, for easy access. By having customer support staff manage the chatbot and respond to enquiries in real time, it takes away the effort visitors need to put in to learn about the brand.


TextExpander

In order to streamline the chatbot communication process, I use the software, TextExpander. TextExpander lets you save blocks of writing (called “snippets”) for easy access. Customer support staff would be required to answer similar questions repeatedly. With TextExpander, all they need to do is type in a keyword and the entire message they’ve set up will automatically appear.


The chatbot copy

The copy above are possible responses a customer support staff could use to answer commonly asked questions from visitors.


Here are some things to note about the copy:

  • Straightforward responses that only present important information: Visitors who submit enquiries through the chatbot are unlikely to ask complicated questions, or want long answers.

  • Bullet lists: Presenting information in bullet lists makes it easier for visitors to skim through the chatbot’s response.

  • Conversational, casual tone: This makes communication through the chatbot more 'human' rather than robotic.

  • Links to relevant web pages that answer FAQs in greater detail: If interested, visitors can conveniently access more in-depth information relevant to their enquiries through those links. Adding links to forms and sales pages can increase leads and conversions.



Research

Due to the constraints of this project, I only wrote copy for responses to questions associated with foodservice providers. To identify common questions visitors have and the answers to them, I surfed the company’s website. It had heaps of valuable information on it already, so external research wasn’t necessary. Then I summarized that information to make it all accessible from a chatbot. If Impossible Foods implemented this project, they would need to collate all common enquires and embed typical responses into TextExpander.



Concluding Points

For this project, I heavily focused on optimizing the customer support process and in some ways, the website's user-experience. This is because increasing customer satisfaction and strengthening customer-brand relationships oftn has a chain effect, where it leads to more brand awareness, and consequently, a boost for sales.




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