In a recent interview with The Experience Edge PodcastCrunchyroll Senior Director of Global SVOD Customer Experience, Luciane Carrillo, admitted a blind spot in its AI chat support, which handles 50% of customer service queries for supported languages.

When asked whether the AI chatbots are actually solving these queries, Carrillo replied:
“Yeah, that’s the part where I cannot have a firm response because I don’t know — because the technology we have right now doesn’t let us really dig into what that experience is. So, we don’t have a way to gauge C-SAT (Customer Satisfaction).“

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“We only know the volume is coming down, and they’re not coming back to us. But I don’t have very accurate data that I feel comfortable that we are resolving those situations. But this is changing. We’re going through this big overhaul on the technology, and hopefully, when we meet sometime next year, we’ll have another success story to share. But it’s something that we are investing in right now. We need to understand what is happening with that 50% that we are not serving anymore, so hopefully, they are using the self-service and it’s working well.“

Carrillo, who joined Crunchyroll last March after nearly 13 years at Netflix, revealed other aspects of Crunchyroll that she believes need improvement. Carrillo said there was a resistance to blunt feedback compared to Netflix and that the company and her Customer Experience (CX) team were at an earlier stage of maturity. Nevertheless, she praised Crunchyroll’s structure, describing the fact that the CX team is under the Product and Engineering teams as “lucky” and a “privileged position.” This allows customer considerations to be at the forefront of all product rollouts.

Crunchyroll Aims To Roll Out Anime-Inspired AI Chatbots, Remove Customer Service Email Support & Web Forms

Carrillo also gave notable insight into the future of Crunchyroll’s customer service. It looks set to maintain its lack of phone call agents, due to Crunchyroll users generally being “introverted.” She said, “Our fans also are more on the introverted side of things. They don’t really like to talk to us. Like, we don’t even provide voice support because they would never call us.“

“They’d rather text us or send us an email, or self-serve. So, now I need to adapt, and like, how can we provide the best self-service for them so then they can do their thing? But, there will be situations where it’s bigger problems that they will have to have to talk to somebody. Then I want to make sure my agents are also leveraging AI to provide the best support that they can to that fan.“

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A major Crunchyroll initiative is to roll out chat support to all supported languages, and deprecate the web form and email support, solely providing real-time support through human agents and AI. Continuing from her work at Netflix, Carrillo has been working on instilling a global mindset in the agents, making them aware of cultural differences in communication styles to bypass misunderstandings.

Perhaps the most notable development is that Crunchyroll is considering anime-inspired AI chatbots: “One thing that we keep working on and would love to get to a point where when you communicate with us through a chatbot. for example, when you’re trying to self-serve, we want to create that persona on the bot so then we can also provide the same type of experience you live in your day-to-day when you are cosplaying or something.“

Source: The Experience Edge Podcast
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