Traeger Grills Fires Up Generative AI Customer Service With Early Adoption of New Capabilities

Traeger Grills is expanding its use of generative AI within customer service by providing agents with easier access to information and personalized recommendations. 

The consumer goods company, which manufactures a range of smokers, grills, and barbeque products, is serving as an early adopter for several new genAI capabilities in Amazon Connect, AWS’s cloud contact center, including Q in Connect and Connect Contact Lens, both of which were announced at Amazon’s re:Invent event last week. 

Q in Connect leverages generative AI to help understand customer issues and in turn supply agents with recommended responses and actions that are based on their real-time questions. Traeger expects the technology to improve its agent efficiency by 20%.  

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By tapping into Amazon Connect Contact Lens, meanwhile, Traeger employees will be able to summarize important information from customer conversations and ideally eliminate the need to read long call transcripts or listen to full recordings.   

Generative AI in Customer Service 

The use of AI in customer service isn’t new — about half of customer contacts made by banking, telecommunications, and utilities companies in North America are already handled by machines, according to McKinsey & Company — but the rapid escalation (and attention) of generative AI has fueled expectations. In fact, one survey of customer service leaders from Boston Consulting Group found that 95% expect customers to be served by an AI bot at some point in their customer service interactions within the next three years.

Increasing efficiency plays a large part in the eagerness to adopt artificial intelligence within customer service, but the technology has also shown to have better results and improve employee retention: Using an AI-based conversational assistant tool not only increased productivity an average of 14%, but these interactions also had higher average NPS scores and decreased agent attrition by 9%, according to an MIT and Stanford University study. 

Traeger for its part has already been using natural language processing (NLP) within its customer service capabilities for some time, and it’s even extended the use of these insights within its R&D to improve faulty products. The company is also using NLP and generative AI to quickly visualize business intelligence. 

Corey Savory, Traeger Grills VP, customer experience and service, noted in a statement that as they’ve grown their customer base and product diversity, providing agents and supervisors with correct information at the right time to increase customer satisfaction has remained one of its biggest challenges. 

These new generative AI features have shown great promise in testing at Traeger’s contact center, he noted. “In the future, we envision these features will enable our agents and supervisors to focus on delivering premier customer experiences.”