Checkatrade helps millions of people find trusted tradespeople, from plumbers and electricians to builders and decorators. As the business grows, so does the opportunity to make every interaction easier, both for consumers looking for help and for the tradespeople building their businesses on the platform.
For Checkatrade, that meant rethinking how customer operations could scale.
Checkatrade wanted to handle growing contact volume while giving customers faster, more consistent support and creating more capacity across its frontline team. That capacity could then be focused on the conversations where expertise, empathy, and human judgment make the biggest difference.
With Decagon, Checkatrade started building toward a different model: AI agents that resolve customer needs and increasingly take action across the customer journey.
“The goal will never be to automate every interaction. We want AI resolving the needs it can handle well, so our frontline teams have more time for the conversations where expertise, empathy, and human judgment add the most value.”- Charles Riley, CX AI Operations Lead, Checkatrade
Starting with the channel that matters most
Voice is Checkatrade's primary customer contact channel, so it became the natural place to start.
Checkatrade launched AI Charlie, an inbound voice agent powered by Decagon. Charlie identifies why someone is calling, uses Checkatrade's knowledge to help resolve their need, performs identity and verification checks when required, and can route customers to the appropriate frontline team with the context from their conversation intact.
From the beginning, Checkatrade made resolution its primary measure of success.
“Resolution is really the measure that matters to us. We want to know: did we actually help the customer on that call? And if we didn't resolve it, what can we learn from that interaction to make the experience better next time?” - Charles Riley
Checkatrade took a deliberate approach to building trust in Charlie. Through a rigorous QA process, the team validated performance across resolution, routing, and identity verification before gradually increasing traffic. Charlie handles 65% of Checkatrade's inbound calls each week. When calls are escalated to frontline teams, Charlie provides enriched context on customer enquiries, enabling agents to assist from the start of the interaction. As the team has moved from knowledge-based answers toward more targeted, actionable Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), Checkatrade has also increased direct resolution from 5% to 12%.
The result is a model that can absorb more customer demand, help more customers accomplish what they need during the first interaction, and give frontline teams more capacity for conversations where the human touch matters most.
Building AI that sounds like Checkatrade
As Checkatrade scales its AI program, the team is designing every voice experience to feel natural and helpful.
Checkatrade has designed its voice agents to behave like its frontline teams: personable, friendly, and easy to talk to. With the ability to listen, speak, and act at the same time, the agents can give customers progress updates, respond naturally to interruptions, and keep conversations moving.
“We want the AI agent to interact with customers the way our best frontline agents would: personable, friendly, and easy to talk to. It may be AI, but the experience should still feel human.”- Charles Riley
That balance is central to Checkatrade's approach. The goal is to resolve more needs end to end while bringing in human expertise at the moments where it adds the most value.
Putting AI ownership closer to the customer
As Charlie took on more volume, Checkatrade also expanded who could build and improve its AI customer experience.
Ownership of Decagon sits within customer operations, putting the people closest to customer interactions in a position to analyze performance, identify opportunities, build AOPs, and continuously improve how the agents operate.
With more ownership of the AI experience, these team members are turning into experience architects, using their knowledge of customers and operations to directly shape how AI behaves.
Checkatrade's central team also works with teams across the business to scope new agents, design AOPs, test and iterate on experiences, and support them as they take ownership of their agents once they're live.
Every person at Checkatrade who wants to build in Decagon also completes Decagon University, giving more of the team the skills to work directly with the platform and shape the AI experience.
“You shouldn't need to be an engineer to improve the customer experience. Decagon makes it easy for people to get into the platform, understand what's happening, and identify where we can make the experience better.”- Charles Rile
Decagon's Duet has become an important part of that operating model. The Checkatrade team uses it daily to analyze conversations, surface gaps, understand performance, and determine what to build or improve next.
Those insights are helping the team move from giving customers the right information toward resolving the underlying need.
“We started with knowledge and answering questions. Now we're asking: how do we actually solve the customer's problem? That's pushed us toward more targeted workflows that can take a customer all the way through to resolution.” - Charles Riley
Taking AI beyond support
With its inbound foundation in place, Checkatrade quickly saw an opportunity to apply the same approach to proactive customer engagement. Just six weeks after launching Charlie, Checkatrade expanded into outbound voice with Decagon.
Many outbound campaigns require significant frontline time. AI agents give Checkatrade a way to take on more of that work while bringing a person into the conversation when human support can add value.
Today, three outbound AI agents are live, with another being scoped and additional use cases under consideration.
That expansion includes AI Veronica, an outbound agent designed to help tradespeople complete the final step required to pass vetting and move closer to going live on Checkatrade.
Veronica focuses on tradespeople who have only their ID check outstanding, the highest-volume check Checkatrade sees left incomplete on its own. Once connected, Veronica guides the trade through logging into the Checkatrade app, locating the ID check, and uploading a live selfie and acceptable ID document. If they need additional help, Veronica can connect them directly with a human agent.
That extends the impact beyond support. By helping more tradespeople move through onboarding and toward activation, Checkatrade is turning customer service into a lever for growth.
Since launching on August 19, 31% of tradespeople who connect with Veronica have gone on to complete their ID check. Checkatrade is now expanding Veronica to support a larger cohort and a broader range of outstanding onboarding requirements.
With Decagon handling this high-volume outreach at scale, Checkatrade can help more tradespeople complete onboarding and move toward activation while focusing its vetting team on the customers who need additional support.
From customer support to customer concierge
Checkatrade's vision extends beyond resolving more customer inquiries. The team sees an opportunity for AI to play a broader role across the customer journey, helping customers accomplish what they came to Checkatrade to do and proactively guiding them toward the right next step.
That could mean helping customers book services, supporting sales conversations, reengaging people who have shown interest, helping tradespeople strengthen their profiles, and creating more opportunities to connect customers with the right products and services. Over time, Checkatrade also sees potential to bring that experience into channels such as chat.
Together, those opportunities point toward a broader concierge experience: AI that understands why a customer is engaging, has the context to provide relevant support, can take action on their behalf, and knows when to bring in a person.
Checkatrade is building the foundation for that future today. By increasing resolution, putting AI ownership closer to the people who understand its customers, and expanding into proactive engagement, the team is creating a model that can support customers across more of their relationship with Checkatrade.
As that model expands, AI has the potential to become a new front door to Checkatrade, helping customers get more done while creating new opportunities for activation, engagement, and growth across the marketplace.
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