# Cutting contact rate with AI and self-service

> An AI chatbot answered 60% of tier-1 questions and helped defer 4–6 hires.

- Topic: Results
- About: Andrew Dyer, customer experience and operations leader, Boston
- Canonical page: https://andyer.com/help/articles/self-service-and-contact-rate

**The result:** at Workable, our AI chatbot (Forethought) answered 60% of tier-1 questions. Together with root-cause fixes, it cut contact rate (Workable) (tickets that reached a person, divided by monthly active users) in half. CSAT held at 97%, and we deferred 4–6 hires while the business grew.

**My take:** the bot was the last step, not the first. It worked because we'd already written 700+ articles, videos, and guides for it to draw on.

**What I did:** wrote the requirements, worked across teams on the rollout, owned the budget, and built the content plan with my team. After launch, I owned the bot.

**What kept it good for customers:**

- We rolled it out in phases, so we could see the impact without disrupting customers or the team.
- It never blocked anyone from reaching a human.
- We connected more than the help desk, bringing in HubSpot and customer context to personalize it and get customers to the right person the first time.
- We audited the logs every month to find improvements.
- Cancellations, purchases, and requests for a person always followed fixed flows, never improvised bot answers.

**The harder rollout was internal.** Agents were slow to adopt Forethought's agent-facing tool, which we launched alongside the bot. Training laid the groundwork, but a usage leaderboard and handing peer training to the team's heaviest user made it stick.

**Why contact rate:** I track contact rate instead of deflection because it captures all of our customer enablement work in one number: the bot, the help center, onboarding, the academy, and the product fixes. Deflection only tells you how the bot thinks it did.

[Read the full case study](https://andyer.com/embedded-ai-chatbot)