Our customer service needs at Tru-Tone are somewhat unusual. Beginning around mid-October, our ticket volume increases (quite dramatically) and can reach multiple hundreds of conversations per week through the holiday season. By late January, that volume typically falls back to a relative trickle for most of the year.
Hiring a large seasonal support team might sound like the obvious solution – and something we'd be happy to do – but effectively supporting Tru-Tone customers requires a considerable amount of specialized knowledge. Our products are rooted in a long tradition of incandescent Christmas lighting, with specialized components, terminology, and troubleshooting methods that are not always familiar to or quickly grasped by newcomers. Becoming a genuinely helpful support agent for Tru-Tone thus requires more training and hands-on experience than can usually be developed during a short seasonal position.
That's why we're excited to introduce Trudy, our new AI Support Assistant built for one specific purpose: to make our customer support faster, easier, and more helpful without sacrificing the depth of knowledge our customers deserve.
Built by someone who knows our customers and products
Trudy was not purchased, switched on, and left to figure things out on her own.
The system backing Trudy was carefully built and configured by Tru-Tone’s Customer Support Manager (you may know him as Ron @ Tru-Tone), a former developer and lifelong Christmas lover, who has spent more than a year and a half serving as the primary person answering Tru-Tone customer questions on the front lines.
That means that our system has been shaped by firsthand experience with our products, our policies, and the real situations our customers regularly encounter using our lights and other products in the wild.
Trudy's knowledge comes from numerous in-depth troubleshooting scenarios in conjunction with the same support articles found in our Knowledge Base – all of which are written by our human team.
In other words, our goal is not to replace knowledgeable human support. It is instead an effort to make that human knowledge available more quickly and at scale, especially during the busiest weeks of the year.
Human support is still available
Customers will always be able to ask for a human.
We understand that some people prefer speaking with a person, particularly when an issue is complicated, unusual, or frustrating. Trudy is designed to recognize when a conversation should be escalated, and customers may also request a human directly at any time.
That said, we hope our customers will give Trudy a chance before dismissing our automated support system entirely. We have invested a great deal of care into making it genuinely useful and have not merely placed a generic chatbot between customers and our human team.
For many common questions, the system should be able to provide an accurate answer or complete a request much faster than a person could, especially during the height of the holiday season. When it cannot, a human can and will gladly step in.
We will keep improving it
Our virtual support assistant will never be considered “finished.”
We will continue improving Trudy by reviewing how she performs, identifying gaps in her knowledge, correcting mistakes, and expanding what she can safely and reliably help customers accomplish. Her abilities will improve as we encounter new questions and build better procedures for handling them.
Our goal is for Trudy to eventually be able to resolve the large majority of routine customer inquiries, allowing our human support staff to devote more time and attention to the trickiest of tricky situations... the ones that are highly specific or are simply better handled person to person.
What we do not use AI for
Although we are comfortable using this technology as a carefully managed customer support tool, we draw a firm distinction between operational assistance and creative work.
We do not (and never will) use generative image generation tools to create our:
Product designs
Product photography
Product imagery
Product descriptions
Social media posts
Advertising artwork
Brand photography or illustrations
The creative work associated with Tru-Tone is (and has always been) made by real people: our co-founder, David, primarily, along with occasional illustrative assistance from talented freelance designers he's met during his years working in other creative endeavors.
This is worth stating plainly because we have, in fact, been accused of using AI-generated artwork in the past. The image below shows an advertisement we created using a real painting we commissioned from a real human artist (based on a photo of our co-founders' nephew, Finn) to invoke the nostalgic look of mid-century Christmas advertisements.
The evidence offered against it was that the hands holding the light string had unusual-looking fingers, a notoriously "tell-tale sign" of computer-generated imagery.
As it turns out, perfectly rendering human hands is not only a problem that generative image models have trouble with; all human artists will likely have struggled with accurately portraying fingers at some point in their career (just ask one) and often only become an expert at it after decades of practice.
Despite this, we remain proud to support human-led creativity, even when the result is slightly imperfect fingers.
New technology, old-fashioned care
Tru-Tone has always existed at the intersection of old and new: preserving the warmth and character of vintage Christmas lighting while making it practical for the present day. Trudy is simply another expression of that same philosophy. She may be built on decidedly modern technology, but her purpose is reassuringly traditional: to offer prompt, knowledgeable, and thoughtful help when our customers need it most.