How Lippert Components uses agentic AI to enhance customer care
When you jump onto an RV or set off in a boat, you don’t want to worry about the underlying components that make them work. You just hope they all connect seamlessly and reliably – which is exactly how Lippert Components wants its customer care employees to engage with artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking in a session at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week, Lippert Components’ AI conversation designer Will Tracey talked about how his firm has combined technology from Salesforce and NICE to enhance customer experiences as it expands into areas that include automotive towing, residential building and housing products.
“We’re really making components for just about everything at this point,” he said. “And so, because of that broad scope, it’s really important for us to get that customer experience right.”
Lippert Components
Looking at Lippert Components’ customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys had already identified one area where CX was going wrong: the button-oriented menu on its website was confusing for the diverse range of customer types to navigate and find the information they need. They might be searching for pricing, product details or even a product manual to troubleshoot an issue.
Many companies have tried to solve this issue by deploying a simple web site chatbot, but Tracey noted those tools are often limited in answering basic questions. Agentic AI represents an opportunity to help customers and employees get at the more complex details they need.
“Rather than going through what is essentially a speaking form, they can have real conversation, where it’s relevant and really gets to the heart of what they need, or sends them to the right resource,” he said.
Tracey talked about a newer hire who has been with Lippert Components for about a year as an example of an customer care employee who benefits from an AI agent.
“She knows most things, but when you look at some of the (questions or concerns) we deal with, they can (relate to) very old products,” he said. “Knowledge can be missing or buried and hard to find. She can ask the AI agent rather than having to wait for someone more experienced to have a moment in between calls or something to assist her, and she finds the answer.”
This can translate into employees saving 15 minutes on a customer call, Tracey said.
Lippert has also traditionally relied on human operators to transfer customers between employees, but AI has allowed the company to reduce that team by about 50 per cent and transfer staff to other roles and tasks. For customers, it means fewer instances of randomly seeing out help.
“When you leave it up to the customer to determine where they need to go, the burden is on on them,” he said. “By taking that off of them, there’s less chance that they just press a number to get somebody.”
As agentic AI becomes more advanced and pervasive, Tracey said companies will likely shift from tackling inbound customer service to more proactive guiding and selling.
“I think with agent-based AI, we’re going to see pretty much all retail really become a very catered experience,” he said. “You can really make it so that you’re giving every customer their own personal shopper. The agent is able to access way more information immediately than a human’s ever going to be able to, and so keeping all of that information straight about a particular customer will allow you to turn your sales people into your best support people, because they’ll have all the answers customers need.”
Recordings of Tracey’s session as well as others at Dreamforce 2025 are available to stream on-demand for registered users of Salesforce+.
