Coinbase enhances customer support and operational efficiency with Claude
Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency exchange, uses Claude to power its AI-driven customer support chatbot, agent assist tool, and help center search. This enhances customer experiences and improves operational efficiency across its platform, supporting over 100 geographies and $226 billion in quarterly trading volume.
With Claude, Coinbase saw:
- Increase in automation rate for their customer-facing chatbot
- Reduced customer service handling time
- Significant improvements in search relevance for their AI-powered help center
- Ability to handle thousands of messages per hour
- Support for several million users
Addressing scalability and consistency in crypto customer support
With unpredictable spikes in trading volume and customer inquiries, Coinbase needed a flexible AI solution to automate routine inquiries, assist human agents, improve help center functionality, scale rapidly to handle demand surges, and maintain strict security and compliance standards.
Varsha Mahadevan, Senior Engineering Manager at Coinbase, explains, "The crypto economy presents a distinct challenge due to its unpredictable nature. Traffic patterns are volatile, with sudden and intense spikes in activity. This demanded a solution that prioritized high availability to handle these surges seamlessly."
Selecting Claude for performance, flexibility, and security
Coinbase chose Claude for its performance, multi-cloud flexibility, and robust security features. Varsha Mahadevan, Senior Engineering Manager at Coinbase, emphasizes, “Claude outperformed all competitors in our internal tests, making it the top choice for our needs. Its performance and availability in AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI were key in our decision.”
Coinbase's multi-cloud strategy with Claude addresses challenges in the volatile crypto market. Mahadevan explains, "In our industry, it's essential that customers have uninterrupted access to their funds. We're committed to achieving 99.9999% availability for near-constant uptime and reliability." This approach ensures high availability and effective load balancing, and enhances security through redundancy. The multi-cloud setup optimizes performance and cost by managing AI model quotas across different cloud platforms.
Mahadevan adds, "Anthropic's multi-cloud solution stands out for its scale, performance and security, aligning with our operational needs and customer expectations. It exceeded our performance benchmarks and met all our security requirements, making it the ideal solution."
Implementing Claude across customer-facing and internal systems
Before releasing their conversational AI system, Coinbase engaged in several collaborative sessions with the Anthropic team. Coinbase guided Anthropic through their system architecture and shared the prompts used in their AI chain. Anthropic provided feedback, best practices, and tips for optimizing Claude prompts. Coinbase incorporated this feedback into their implementation, refining their approach based on Anthropic's expertise. Additionally, Anthropic shared examples of their own complex internal prompts, inspiring Coinbase to structure their instructions to Claude more effectively.
Coinbase integrated Claude into three key systems:
- Customer support chatbot: An agentic system using Claude for query rephrasing, response generation, and output styling, with robust financial compliance guardrails.
- Agent assist tool: Helps human agents draft responses, explain procedures, and access relevant information. Mahadevan noted, "It's highly efficient to not spend time or effort refining responses in multiple languages for the customer."
- Help center search: Uses Claude to enhance result relevance and generate concise answers, leveraging Coinbase's existing knowledge bases and customer data.
Coinbase also created CB-GPT (Coinbase GPT), an internal platform for building AI-powered applications for rapid experimentation and development. Mahadevan reports, "We've built over 35 to 50 applications." CB-GPT allows teams to quickly prototype and launch new AI use cases, supporting the company's vision of providing AI assistance for all employees and customers.
Improving support efficiency and customer experience
The customer support chatbot has increased automation, resolving more inquiries without human intervention. The AI assistant has also improved average handling time for human agents, enabling faster customer service.
Claude has successfully managed unpredictable cryptocurrency trading volumes and support demands. This has given Coinbase flexibility to handle traffic spikes while maintaining high-quality support.
Coinbase's AI tools have also sped up onboarding and increased support staff productivity. Mahadevan highlighted the benefit, "New agents join weekly and require proper training and familiarity with procedures. This Agent Assist chatbot streamlines onboarding by enabling them to query knowledge bases, offering multi-lingual support, and efficiently processing a wide range of unstructured text inputs."
Expanding AI capabilities to transform the crypto experience
Coinbase is excited about generative AI’s potential to transform their business. Future plans include expanding personalized support enriched with customer data, applying AI across more business functions, developing custom fine-tuned models for specialized tasks, and exploring AI applications in crypto trading, security, and product development.
Mahadevan outlines AI's impact on Coinbase and its customers: "AI frees up hours each week for employees across various roles. It's not just about doing more of the same work; it's about exploring new frontiers. It's about unlocking new value and possibilities for our employees. Our vision is two-fold: AI support for every customer and employee."
Coinbase sees Claude as a key partner in achieving their mission.
Once in three decades a technology emerges that impacts every function in an enterprise. I'm optimistic about this and excited to bring this power to Coinbase. We think Claude will help Coinbase build solutions for different customer segments and bring a billion customers to the crypto economy.
— Varsha Mahadevan, Senior Engineering Manager at Coinbase