Case Studies
Why PMI shifted 88% of phone and email conversations to messaging channels
The Project Management Institute (PMI) is the largest project management membership association in the world, serving experienced and aspiring project managers across a variety of industries. Over the last few years, PMI’s customer support model has changed to focus on the channels their customers prefer using, which meant moving away from traditional email and phone support, and providing more digital customer service options like messaging and live chat on the PMI website.
Here’s how they made that transition happen with LivePerson.
The journey in numbers
88%
of customer conversations on messaging channels
24%
increase in conversations contained YOY
>1.5m
interactions with virtual assistant
24%
growth in webchats YOY
42%
growth in messaging YOY
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The ever-evolving project of customer support
PMI was founded in 1969 and serves millions of professionals today, with a membership base of over 730,000 people.
PMI is best known for its Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification, which currently has over 1.5 million active certification holders around the world. It’s the go-to certification for anyone aspiring to become a project manager or grow their career in project management.
It’s safe to say that PMI gets a lot of questions about the PMP. And while email and phone calls had always been PMI’s primary customer support channels, their customers’ communications preferences were changing.
“The PMP is our biggest revenue driver, and our support team regularly gets inquiries about everything from scheduling exams to prerequisites needed to apply for the PMP.”
~ Dionne Lewis, Customer Advocate Supervisor at PMI
Challenge: Transitioning to digital-first support
Even though the PMI team wanted to expand their support options with messaging channels, they had a problem: their previous on-prem solution was out of date and lacked many basic features consumers had come to expect from a modern messaging experience.
For example, customers couldn’t tell during conversations if agents were typing and vice versa. “If an agent was writing a detailed response, the customer wouldn’t be able to see that and they’d ask, ‘Hey are you still there?’’ says Dionne.
They also wanted to start leveraging advanced digital capabilities like AI and automation. “One of the things that drew us to LivePerson was that it was so user-friendly,” says Dionne. “The product included visionary features that closely matched our objectives, validating our long-term strategic plans.”
But besides using automation to drive containment and self-service, PMI had another goal: upskill their workforce — not reduce it. The vision? To create a more effective and efficient support model, and maximize the skills of their agents.
“The PMI Virtual Assistant manages approximately 38% of incoming chats, effectively reducing the load on our human agents. This deflection allows our agents to focus on providing top-tier support for more complex customer inquiries.”
~ Carla Stone, Conversational Designer and Bot Product Owner at PMI
Solution: LivePerson’s intelligent routing and AI Copilot
To adapt to conversational customer service and strategically automate the support experience, PMI needed an established partner that could provide forward-thinking AI solutions. They chose LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud® platform for its intuitiveness and enterprise-friendly features, including:
Digital messaging
PMI’s first step involving their digital messaging channel was to harness LivePerson’s web messaging and continue providing all-human agent support. Once agents started getting familiar with the platform, they introduced more channels like WhatsApp and SMS to continue the transition away from phone calls and email.
Bot automation and AI routing
The next step was to build a virtual assistant. PMI was able to build a V1 themselves using LivePerson’s out-of-the-box capabilities, before getting some help from the LivePerson solutions team as they went about their journey. Over the next few months, they started rolling the virtual assistant out into the front-end of their digital channels. More recently, the team has used LivePerson’s AI Studio to implement AI-guided routing to effectively route conversations using intent recognition, interaction history, and other signals.
Copilot
LivePerson’s agent-facing generative AI tool, Copilot, is helping PMI’s human agents by auto-suggesting responses to customers and summarizing conversations. “The recap feature has been a hit with our agents,” says Daniel Cortez, a Customer Advocacy Analyst at PMI. “It quickly summarizes any action items, which makes for faster case handling times.”
“With LivePerson, we can optimize our content to align with customer expectations, continually improving our deflection and containment rates.”
~ Mark Malizia, Customer Operations Strategist at PMI
Business and customer outcomes
With LivePerson, PMI is now able to increase containment and deflection rates while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. They can also pull valuable insights from their conversation data. For example, if they change an exam or eLearning offering, they can quickly see if it aligns with customers’ expectations and where the business is going.
The move toward messaging has been a success, with about 568,000 web messaging conversations in 2023 — marking a 24% increase in volume compared to 2022. Containment rates have improved, with a 51% increase in conversations contained year over year from 2022 to 2023 and continued improvements in 2024.
“We’re also using AI Studio to build out AI-guided routing,” says Julia Zakrzewski, Bot Monitor & Analyst, referring to LivePerson’s advanced bot authoring environment for customizing and testing AI agents. “We’ve been using it on web chat for the last few months, and it’s already decreased our rate of fallbacks and unmatched intents.”
“Partnering with LivePerson, our Customer Support AI journey has seen remarkable success. We’ve transformed our conversational AI system from handling 4% of support volume in 2021 to an impressive 28.5% in 2024. This translates to 107,000 customer interactions managed by AI this year alone. These achievements have significantly boosted our efficiency and have allowed us to scale in ways not possible before. Additionally, this journey has enabled us to create new roles such as Bot Monitors, driving further innovation in our team.”
~ Mark Emery, Director of Customer Care at PMI
Unlocking AI’s potential for the project management industry
Looking to the future, PMI is planning to expand its virtual assistant to multiple languages to serve its global audience, and leverage LivePerson’s generative AI tools such as Copilot’s enhanced response suggestions for agents, across more channels. As a testament to PMI’s innovative work with conversational AI and chatbots, it was also nominated for a Promptie Award at Unparsed, one of the top conversational AI conferences in the world. We’re excited to see how they continue to leverage LivePerson to provide an industry-leading, AI-empowered customer experience.