How Brigit enhanced customer support with Ada’s AI Agent
Brigit, the most downloaded financial health app in the United States, is dedicated to improving financial inclusion in America. More than 7 million users have used the app’s suite of tools to improve their finances by accessing cash advances, budgeting better, building their credit, and finding new ways to earn and save money.
Prioritizing customer satisfaction
At the core of Brigit's mission is a commitment to helping people; and the customer success team strives every day to do that with a personalized touch. Gia Sotelo, Customer Experience Manager, emphasizes maintaining an empathetic tone and timely responses in every interaction.
"Our key metrics are quality assurance, CSAT, and response time. Resolving hundreds of tickets is impressive, but more importantly, we aim to ensure resolutions are accurate, helpful, and considerate."
Brigit initially deployed a scripted Ada chatbot in 2022 to handle increasing conversation volumes without expanding headcount. This move improved efficiency and reduced costs, even as the company grew.
"As Brigit continues to grow, it's essential that we scale our operations and customer care efficiently. We want to ensure that we continue to deliver an amazing experience to our customers, who depend on us to keep their finances on track. Implementing Ada's AI Agent has allowed us to manage increasing support volumes without expanding our team. This strategic approach enables us to allocate resources effectively, maintain exceptional service quality, and remain focused on our mission to improve financial inclusion."
Having Ada in place also helps Brigit forecast for busy seasons and scale up and down as needed. Gia remarks, "It’s kind of like an agent. So we account for the percentage of tickets it can handle, and because it’s very predictable, we can forecast around it.”
The advent of AI Agents
As generative AI has been gaining traction, customer expectations have evolved. Gia recognized the need to adopt generative AI to maintain Brigit's technological edge and meet changing demands.
"Our scripted chatbot was really effective, but expectations for AI have shifted, and we wanted to ensure we were responsive. It was time to upgrade."
Gia knew she had to embrace generative AI to keep Brigit at the forefront of technology and remain an industry leader, but she still had hesitations. She had developed the responses and flows for the scripted bot herself, and as a result, she trusted it implicitly. She knew how it would answer and in what tone and had built a great deal of confidence in the accuracy and quality of the responses.
In order to upgrade to an AI Agent, Gia first needed to establish trust. She wanted to see what levers she could control to ensure that the AI Agent would truly be better for Brigit’s customers — understanding their needs, empathizing, and offering on-point resolutions to their issues.
Speeding up email support with AI
Despite the success of chat automation, email support remained a manual-intensive task due to its sensitive nature and volume, making it challenging to meet response expectations.
Inbound emails account for around 30% of the monthly support conversation volume. With customers expecting businesses to reply to emails in 2.5 hours , meeting that standard without massively scaling the team would have proven impossible without leveraging an AI solution.
The Early Access Program for Ada’s AI Agent for email offered the perfect opportunity to test generative AI capabilities. Brigit adopted this technology to automate a portion of their email volume, with Gia monitoring the quality of interactions closely.
"Would the AI Agent capture the right tone? Would customers appreciate interacting with it? I reviewed every single interaction to ensure it met our objectives."
The results
A month after onboarding the AI Agent, its success was undeniable. Brigit updated their website to note, “For the fastest response, email our new AI Agent, Sonny, 24/7 via [email protected]”. “In two months, over 6K people trusted it enough to send an email; which is amazing,” Gia says.
“Customers want fast, immediate answers, and I think they're surprised when they get that experience through email,” Gia says. “They’ve even given the AI Agent direct compliments during interactions. We’ve heard, ‘Impressive software, that was nice!’ And people seem to accept what it's saying much more than the scripted bot. They seem to trust its intelligence.”
When measuring CSAT, Gia said, “It was great to see that the AI Agent was exceeding our expectations — outperforming our scripted chatbot. People are trusting virtual agents to answer their questions and help solve their issues, allowing us to grow and scale in a sustainable way that keeps customers at the top of everything we do.”
Moving forward
Gia learned a lot about onboarding and managing an AI Agent from the email EAP, such as how to optimize the knowledge base and coach the AI Agent. This has prepared her to promote it to handle more volume and other channels.
By providing instant, accurate and empathetic responses, the AI Agent not only improved the overall customer experience but freed up time for agents. Gia can now think about how to evolve the way that the customer service team operates.
“There’s always something to be done. I could expand hours of live chat for agents and improve productivity,” Gia says. “I am able to tell my leaders that our AI Agent can talk to our customers all day, every day, and it never gets tired. It has a consistent stamina and attitude that never changes. That’s what AI gives us.”
The success of the technology allows the Marketing Team to encourage users to reach out and ask questions without being concerned about overwhelming CX. As Director of Brand Marketing Christy Center puts it, “Brigit’s ability to help people in a pinch extends beyond the app to our customer support team. Being able to trust AI to help customers with the same care our team would is a huge relief. With this technology, we don’t have to worry about trading on-brand tones and messages for faster response times — we can have both. People are able to get the answers they want without having to fumble through FAQs, and the AI responses are personalized, matching the rest of the Brigit experience.”
This program gave the team the insight and confidence they needed to continue integrating support across all touchpoints. Users will never have to go looking for answers — they’ll have them right at their fingertips.
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