Custom AI Chatbot Reduces Daily Customer Support Workload by 80%
About the Client
A book manufacturer specializing in Print on Demand (POD) and short run book production. Since the 1990s, they have maintained industry-trending equipment to provide digitally printed text pages and bound books to clients, with a focus on exceptional quality and sustainable business practices.
- Industry: Retail & Distribution
- Headquartered: Chicago, IL
- Platforms: Anthropic Claude
- Team Size: 4
The Challenge
The client, serving a large customer base, would handle all customer inquiries manually through a team of customer representatives. While they already had a portal in place to handle orders and store customer information, repetitive inquiries from customers were still demanding about 5 hours a day of manual effort from each rep.
The client requested a solution that would balance this workload, freeing up their team to focus on other tasks while still maintaining excellent customer service.
Our Solution
Here's how we solved the client's challenges:
AI Model Selection
For the client’s case, our team chose a chatbot model that delivers natural responses, comprehends questions, and provides accurate answers from a vector-based knowledge base.
- Qdrant with Ollama for vector database management
- Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 for NLP
Development Assistant
The team implemented the development assistant Anthropic Claude Opus 4 to accelerate the client’s project. This allowed the team to complete tasks ~40% faster and significantly reduced bugs and errors throughout the process.
Chatbot Integration
Using the Qdrant Vector Database to store and feed knowledge to the AI, a hybrid search approach combining vector similarity and keyword matching was implemented to retrieve relevant information. Permission-based database lookups were implemented to retrieve customer-specific information like product and order details.
Answer Formatting
To present answers in a natural, human-friendly way, the retrieved responses were reformatted using Anthropic Claude Sonnet for better readability and context. The team also added dynamic prompts to handle incomplete queries, i.e., asking for an order number when customers request order details.
Security & Quality
Our team used an event-driven approach for the chatbot, which ensures authentication and user permission anytime it retrieves data from the client’s database. Additionally, the team implemented comprehensive logging, analytics, monitoring, and anti-hallucination measures to enforce strict context adherence and accuracy.
Technologies Used
Our software architects and engineers are experts in using the latest technologies.
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Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4.0 / Opus 4.0)
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QDrant Vector Database, Ollama
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PHP 8.4
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Laravel Framework v11
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Restful APIs
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Bootstrap
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JavaScript
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HTML5
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CSS3
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MSSQL
Business Impact
Implementing a custom AI chatbot produced transformative results for the client.
Decreased manual effort by ~80%
Resolved issues in real time (99% time saved)
Here’s how we did it
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AI-Driven Development
Using an AI development assistant, the team was able to handle nearly 160% of their workload without increasing headcount.
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Continuous Improvement & Safeguards
Implemented a Chatbot Response Tracking Mechanism to identify unanswered or inaccurately answered queries.
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Customer-Centric Model
Improved customer satisfaction by delivering real-time responses – decreasing turnaround times from 4-8 hours to ~2 minutes.
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Relevant Inquiries
Our team worked closely with the client to develop a comprehensive list of FAQs for the chatbot to reference.
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I wanted to take a moment to highlight and commemorate the efforts from our dedicated PIO team. To preface, the projects we work on here are complex, with rigid objectives, budgets, and timelines. Expectations are always high and are ever-changing. From the start of our relationship, the IO team was able to exceed expectations and make our business wishes a reality.
Over the past year I have worked with them, they have worked very hard to understand our highly customized system and troubleshoot things with little or no documentation while managing to keep the business up and running normally. Without the hard work and dedication they have shown, I know we would have had some issues causing downtime or lost production. I am looking forward to continuing working them in the next year as well.
I have been working with Programmers IO for more than 5 years now and I have been pleased with all projects and developers that I have worked with. We have had a few issues here and there but they have always fixed and made it right. They have been an excellent addition to our business.
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