As a small company, we often wear multiple hats every day. One of our biggest tasks each day is customer support. While we’d like to answer every question and resolve every issue quickly, that’s not always possible. So we thought, what could we do that would be both innovative (read: something our competitors aren’t doing) and helpful, and that would allow us to serve more customers faster?
Meet Ben.
If you’re getting Ben Franklin vibes, that’s on purpose. Being so close to Philadelphia, and Ben being such a big part of the region’s iconography, we thought it appropriate. But Ben Franklin’s early contributions to meteorology in the United States can’t be understated, so we had sound reasoning for his name!
And we have possibly the easiest 800 number to remember to reach us/Ben…
1-888–833-8999
Available 24/7!
Who is Ben?
Ben is a specially trained AI model that can communicate both textย andย voice via technology supplied by Retell AI combined with telephony and SMS services from Twilio. We’ve wanted offer phone support, but the costs are significant.
Add to this that it isn’t exactly easy to find people with experience in weather stations, and you can see the difficulty. AI website chatbots are numerous and easy to set up. But up until recently, the technology just wasn’t there to carry on a voice conversation with an AI agent, or it wasn’t very easy to set up or maintain.
How Ben was developed
Retell AI serves as the basis for Ben, but other technologies are also at work.
For you AI geeks, Ben runs on OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.1 Fast Tier, using their Echo voice. While there is still some delay depending on your request, in our tests and simulations, it more often than not didn’t affect the conversation flow. Even if you’re someone who ums and uhhs, Ben still can understand you just fine. It’s pretty incredible.
Ben is trained on the following:
- All 300+ pages of our site
- Approximately 100 user manuals, installation guides, troubleshooting guides, case studies, and more from brands we sell, including Climalytic, Davis, Maximum, TALOS, and SmartLab Toys
- Select support pages from Davis and Maximum detailing common issues and solutions
- Our various support and marketing PDFs
This training is ongoing: this is only what we needed to give Ben enough knowledge to assist our customers. While he can speak on topics outside these, by default, he will guide the conversation back to his job role. This is to prevent abuse.
In development, we developed Ben first as a voice agent. We wanted him to excel in these situations, as a voice call can be much more unpredictable (and unstructured) than a web chat. We then spent several days running simulations to see how he’d react, including opening it up to a few testers with predetermined chat topics.
Once we were comfortable with how Ben was handling these pre-planned scenarios, we asked testers to start asking Ben anything. We left the unstructured tests until last for a reason. No doubt you have heard about hallucinations in AI. Many of these are caused by holes in the model’s training: if it doesn’t have instructions, it will sometimes “make things up.”
However, if you’ve fine-tuned the model based on its responses to everyday scenarios, it will have a basis for creating a solution when less common scenarios occur. While it’s still developing its own solution, it’s based on training.
It seems to have worked well. As we guided Ben’s responses, the answers got better and better.
Finally, once the development and testing were complete, we took a second pass across our services to ensure security. For example, during the test, you could check the order status by providing just the order number; the live version of Ben asks you to verify the delivery zip code before responding. We did this to prevent possible disclosure of personally identifiable information.
On the backend, all the data Ben accesses is through secure endpoints, and he authenticates every request. These endpoints are not public. These security checks are critical as we work towards phone ordering in the coming months. We’re also taking the initial steps to ensure Ben is PCI-compliant (in business-speak, he can securely handle payment information).
Retell’s service is PCI-compliant natively, which is one of the reasons we chose it over other providers. But compliance is not just a one-way street: our actions can put data at risk. That’s why we’re not rushing this part of Ben, and we hope you understand.
(As a quick note, we DO NOT expect to have phone ordering live by the holidays, but stranger things have happened; stay tuned.)
What can Ben do?
To start, we’re giving Ben the ability to handle some of the most common customer requests.
Here’s what Ben can do:
Answer questions about Cirrusly Weather
This is Ben’s primary role: to answer questions about our business. While we’ve tried to keep information organized, some things might be hidden. Ben helps to uncover the information that you might be looking for.
Explain our policies
Ben’s fully versed in our policies and can answer questions you might have.
Provide product information and recommendations
Ben knows our catalog and can answer all kinds of questions about features and functionality, and make recommendations based on what you tell him. We’ve asked him to be inquisitive (true to his namesake!), so he will likely ask you a series of questions to make a recommendation. With around 200 products, we think this is a great feature.
Send you texts and emails with information
We understand that Ben can give out a lot of information. If you’d like, he can email you or text you at the number you’re calling from. Just ask him!
Check order status
We’re starting with the most common question: “Where is my order?” Ben can look up your order and let you know if it’s shipped, and, better yet, if it is, check the tracking to let you know where it is. He can also access order notes to get additional context on precisely what is happening with your order, and add notes as necessary based on your interactions with him, so we know what happened in the call.
Start returns
Sometimes things don’t go as planned. If you need to start an exchange or return, Ben can help you determine whether your order is eligible and get that process started. Please note that Ben is not the final determination of whether a return or exchange qualifies, but is likely to come to a similar conclusion as our human reps during review, as we’re using the same policies!
Partnerships
Manufacturer, distributor, or supplier, and looking to partner with Cirrusly Weather? Ben can help connect you with our buyers. Provide Ben with the details he needs, and he’ll send your information to us for further review. He can also schedule a meeting if you’d like. It’s that easy.
Open support requests
Ben is a customer support representative at heart, so he will open up support requests as necessary to get you the help you need. For Ben 1.0, we’re limiting this capability to select circumstances, so you can’t open a support request on demand just yet.
Knowledgeable support for brands we sell
Trained on nearly 1,000 pages of information, Ben demystifies manufacturers’ confusing manuals. The genesis of Ben was customer feedback lamenting Davis’ sometimes confusing directions (we totally understand). We’ve uploaded several dozen manuals for Climalytic, Davis, Tempest, TALOS, and Maximum, including a few case studies.
Select support for weather stations we don’t, too!
Initially, we had planned to limit Ben’s capabilities for support to just the stations we sell; however, we wanted to preview Ben’s capabilities to as many people as possible. We’re adding documentation for the following popular models to Ben’s knowledge base that should make him useful to a majority of weather watchers:
- Ecowitt Wittboy
- Ambient Weather WS-1965, WS-2902, and WS-5000
Please note that support for stations we don’t sell is provided as a courtesy, and use of this feature or recommendations is not covered under your warranty. Contact official support channels for more detailed guidance (Ben can connect you)!
Follow our progress
We’re posting our release notes on this page so you can see what changes we make to Ben from release to release. This will also give you an idea of what we’re working toward with this service.
Humans are still involved!
We want to make it entirely clear that humans are very much still involved in this process. Everything above, just like a human customer service representative, is summarized for future reference, and Ben often interfaces with our human reps via e-mails and tickets.
This is just a new feature to allow us to offer support options that would have otherwise been several months away. And so far, Retell AI’s platform has performed remarkably well. We went from the ability to serve one customer at a time to 20 – yes, up to 20 people can carry on conversations with Ben at the same time. We highly doubt we’ll ever need that kind of capacity!
Take the survey
If you use Ben, we’d really appreciate it if you agree at the end of the call to take the experience survey. It’s a super short survey to get your feedback, and it will help guide our plans for Ben.
Ben’s waiting for your call!
