Over the past year we rebuilt the way our care team works, so that every customer gets a fast and very specific answer, and gets it from a person rather than from an AI. 

Before, when you wrote to support and waited nervously for a real answer, the operator opened the ticket and started by checking data: reviewing and confirming a huge amount of information, the order and its items, payments and balance movements, incoming parcels and label photos, the shop's shipping emails, the carrier's tracking data. That took a lot of time and you had to wait half a day, sometimes a whole day, depending on how complex the request was.

Now artificial intelligence works alongside the person from the support team: it recognises the case and gathers all the data as soon as you press “Send” and the request enters processing. The operator opens the card and everything is already there: the point of the question, the facts found with links to the sources, a draft reply and a list of actions. All that is left is to check the information and fine-tune the reply.

The main rule: the decision is always made by a person. The AI only does the rough analytical work. The algorithm does not send messages to customers, does not charge or credit money and does not cancel orders on its own. We deliberately avoid the most annoying part of dealing with an AI, the one that has probably cost you a lot of nerves with other companies' support: impersonal, repetitive robot replies that irritate more than they help. 

Thanks to this thoughtful teamwork between a person and artificial intelligence

• 86% of requests got their first reply on the day they were created (a year ago this figure was 52%).
• 56% of requests were handled within the first hour after being sent (against 30% in September last year).
• The average first reply time dropped to 3 hours 4 minutes — a year ago customers waited 11 hours 54 minutes on average.
• The queue does not pile up: this morning, for example, only 13 tickets across the whole system were waiting for our reply (10 of them complex cases). There are no unanswered questions from yesterday.

What this gives you:

• No empty brush-offs. Instead of «we are looking into it» you get facts: where the parcel is, the status of the payment, what has been done and what the next step is.
• Less back and forth. You no longer need to resend screenshots and tracking numbers, the system finds them by itself. In 39% of cases the question is fully closed with the very first reply.

Of course, unusual and complex situations (tracing shipments lost by the shop, returns to the seller, disputes) still call for longer, detailed manual work and contact with third parties. We do not promise to solve them in a couple of hours, but we give you a clear status of what has already been done right away.

Where else does AI work at Prostobox?

The favourite and most obvious use of artificial intelligence in the service is filling in customs declarations with the AI assistant. What used to take plenty of time and patience now happens in seconds. Instead of typing in the product name, the shop link, the quantity and other details by hand, you simply upload the invoice or any order confirmation from the online shop  and the AI processes and matches the items: 10 items take less than a minute, with no red tape.

AI also watches over internal processes at Prostobox, helps to handle incoming and outgoing parcels and does a lot more, but all of it under the control and close attention of a person. 

We believe artificial intelligence is not a replacement for human intelligence, but a very good tool for speeding up processes and cutting routine, and we will keep adopting new technology to make working with us even more convenient and worthwhile for you.

If you have a question about an order or a parcel right now, write us a ticket from your account. Be sure to include the tracking number so the system passes all the necessary information to the operator straight away.