Simplifying and securing real-time collaboration for over 20 years
Longtime Microsoft partner Instant Technologies is a New Hampshire-based software development company that has been extending and enriching Microsoft’s collaborative products since 2002. Its small-but-mighty team first built persistent chat rooms and compliance archiving for Microsoft Live Communications Server and its successor, Microsoft Office Communications Server, for successful enterprise customers.
Today, Instant applies its decades of experience to a Microsoft Azure OpenAI-powered conversational service desk platform for Microsoft Teams. Transactable in Microsoft Marketplace, Instant Chime easily connects employees to service desk agents (both human and AI) right inside Teams. Customers with as many as 200,000 employees use Chime to respond to and resolve issues in less than half the time of traditional methods.
Chime relies on Azure App Service to provide a globally available, scalable, and secure web application. For vibrant and flexible conversational chat experiences, Chime uses Azure OpenAI, along with Azure SQL as the back-end service powering the reporting and analytics, and Azure SignalR Service for real-time notifications and alerts. For example, if a customer needs human help, Chime notifies the correct representative.
Instant Chime provides customizable experiences to align with brand strategies
Breakthru Immersive, also a Microsoft partner, created the Breakthru digital health platform, which delivers movement and breathing breaks to users in the flow of their workday, right from Teams. Millions of users in almost 50,000 organizations across 80 countries rely on Breakthru to boost their mind, mood, and metabolism and to reduce the well-researched negative effects of remaining sedentary at work.
With such a large, diverse user base, Breakthru faced a problem: how to cost-effectively scale real-time customer engagement across time zones and languages.
Enter Instant Technologies and Chime.
Simplicity is core to Breakthru’s philosophy on user experience: simple to deploy, simple to use. Chime lets Breakthru extend that philosophy to customer engagement. For example, when a user in Norway needs real-time guidance on setting up a challenge as part of his company’s wellbeing week, or when a buyer in Peru needs an immediate answer to a data privacy question, those users can ask those questions in their own language and receive real-time answers – again in their own language – either from an AI agent or from a Breakthru employee.
Chime's workflows are nearly limitless in their flexibility. This was also of vital importance to Breakthru because it allowed the company to customize the user experience to align with its brand of friendly, informal conversational engagement. Integrating Chime into the customer engagement model enabled Breakthru to extend that comfort and familiarity to the entire customer journey, from initial contact to post-launch support.
“We are proud to provide our innovative AI chat platform to Breakthru – using chat to help more companies adopt the Breakthru digital health platform,” Instant Technologies CEO Peyton McManus said. “Two companies, two missions, working together across the Microsoft ecosystem.”
Breakthru has realized dramatic results since moving to Chime, with 98 percent of customer support questions being resolved on the first touch. Additionally, Breakthru has seen a 68 percent increase in low-touch sales revenue, such as when a customer gets a real-time answer, then purchases Breakthru via Microsoft Marketplace.
“Chime from Instant revolutionized our customer engagement model,” said Dan Langille, Breakthru’s VP of Business Development. “Conversing with our users in real time in their native language equals first-touch question resolution, accelerated sales, and overall improved process efficiency across all communication channels.”