Programming Hub leverages AI to see 2x engagement time and improved customer experience
Programming Hub was born out of the sheer need of its founders trying to solve what ailed them - the lack of relevant resources to aid the learning of new technologies in a succinct & practical manner. The app eventually evolved into a mammoth tool offering over 5,000 programs and 150+ courses in 100+ programming languages to IT professionals and college students who wish to learn to code like experts.
With time, Programming Hub has transformed into a learning portal, offering bite-sized, digestible material on each of those languages to empower learners to acquire new skills efficiently and effectively. It has now crossed a cumulative 10M+ installs on Google Play since its inception, with over 1M downloads in the year 2023 itself and 4.7 rating on Play Store.
AI to the rescue
As users grew, the complexity of the nature of incoming queries increased as well. Programming Hub had previously built virtual tutors and assistants to aid the learning experience, but had never dealt with UGC (user generated content) before. The incoming volume of queries made them realize that they could utilize artificial intelligence to help them resolve the bulk of those queries in a fast and efficient manner.
With the help of Vertex API, they created an in-app chat to help users troubleshoot if they got stuck while going through the course. Additionally, they also used PaLM as a way to automate customer support by training it to answer generic queries that users would send over email.
In the first two months of its implementation of the AI assistant, Programming Hub has witnessed the following:
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Ease of training the PaLM AI model - Programming Hub decided to utilize AI to answer course-related queries in an accurate manner. For this, they chose to train PaLM with the help of Google AI Studio (erstwhile MakerSuite).
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Increased engagement, with over 500 users interacting with the AI assistant on a daily basis. There has also been a 2x increase in average user engagement time and number of sessions per user, as a result of the AI implementation.
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Enhanced customer experience, having reduced their CRM response time to under 5 minutes. This has resulted in better customer satisfaction by virtue of quick resolution of issues, thereby reducing the load on the CRM team as well. Additionally, by integrating AI for email support and external queries, they have been able to bring down the resolution time of payment related issues from the 24-48 hour window to now under 30 minutes!
We used Google AI Studio because of how easy it was to feed the context into the AI model to train it and make it highly contextual to our use-case and course material. Training the model was also much easier due to Google AI Studio. It didn’t require any external coding - the learning curve was short & the process was simple.
Scaling & growing
Programming Hub’s mission is to enable 3 billion tech learners worldwide to easily learn & hone their skills. A part of that mission was taken care of with the incorporation of AI. To really help amplify their ongoing efforts to deliver a superior product to their users, they realized they required greater visibility in front of their desired audience. Thus, they started to work towards a larger store presence on Google Play using:
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Localization: They optimized their product page in 20+ languages for different parts of the world using the localization feature.
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Store listing & pricing experiments: These experiments helped Programming Hub conduct proper A/B testing for their store listings, helping them get accurate results and drastically cut down on the decision-making process. These tests also revealed that they were under-pricing their products in certain countries.
All in all, Programming Hub has really doubled down on AI to help accelerate their efforts towards growth. They share that the experiments and optimizations that they’ve undertaken on Play Store & the results they’ve seen have opened up many new avenues for them to try out and has made them confident to run even more ambitious experiments in times to come!